Chapter 19
NINETEEN
Daisy clicked on the bedside lamp and reached for her dressing gown as Alec opened the door.
“Calm down, Derek,” he said. “Come in. What’s the trouble?”
“It’s Ben, Uncle Alec. He tripped on the stairs and he’s knocked himself out.
The stairs from the turret. His eyes are closed and he doesn’t answer or move and I think there’s blood in his hair.
A tremendous bolt of lightning hit the turret and then there was a huge explosion and we thought we’d better get out. ”
“Very wise, though the explosion was thunder, I expect.” Alec returned to the bed for his dressing gown and slippers. “I’ll come at once.”
Derek was shivering in cotton pyjamas and bare feet. “I let him go first, but I had the torch. I shone it down the stairs for him. I should have given it to him.”
“Don’t second-guess yourself, darling,” said Daisy, now sufficiently clad to give him a hug.
Alec had stripped a couple of blankets off their bed. “Here, put this one round you, Derek. No point in risking a chill. Come on.”
Before following, Daisy went to the chest of drawers for a cardigan, a pullover, two pairs of Alec’s socks, and three of his handkerchiefs. Though the lightning conductor had almost certainly averted damage to the turret, there was always a chance the boys’ things in the room might be inaccessible.
Apart from the turret’s winding steps, electric lights were kept on all night at the head and foot of every staircase. Daisy hurried after Alec and Derek, along the passages and up the stairs. As she turned into the last corridor, the others reached the far end.
Ben was sitting on the bottom step, his head in his hands. He looked up groggily as Alec knelt beside him and draped a blanket about his shoulders.
“How are you feeling, Ben?”
“My head hurts.” He raised a hand to feel the side of his head. “It’s sticky.”
“Derek, the torch, please.”
The torch was still turned on. As Derek handed it to Alec, the beam flashed across something on the floor beside the steps. Daisy put down the stuff she’d brought and went to look.
“I’m going to shine this in your eyes. Try to keep them open.”
“All right.”
Daisy picked up a length of bamboo, broken at one end.
“Both pupils dilated and the same size,” Alec said with satisfaction. “You’re probably not concussed. Let me see that head wound now.”
“I brought some hankies,” said Daisy, putting back the cane as nearly as possible in the exact position she had found it. “Here. And Derek, put on this pullover. It won’t get in your way like the blanket. Socks. Alec, may I put socks on Ben’s feet while you check his head?”
Alec shifted a bit to let her get at the small, brown pink-soled feet. The socks were much too big, of course. He wouldn’t be able to walk in them, but the important thing was to warm the boy quickly.
“You’ve got quite a gash there, but it’s already just about stopped bleeding. I don’t think it’ll need stitches. Derek, would you go and soak this handkerchief in cold water, please. Don’t wring it out. Sodden, not dripping too much.”
“Yes, sir.” Derek set out at a run, nearly tripped on the overlarge socks, impatiently tore them from his feet, and sped onward.
Daisy glanced up at the trap door. It was open, a square of darkness. No signs of destruction—fire, smoke, ashes—wafted through. She could fetch the boys’ own clothes in a minute.
“I suppose you hit it on the railing.” Alec turned the torch on the curlicued banisters. The fractured beam paused for a long moment on the piece of bamboo on the floor beyond, then moved on. “Yes, here. Quite near the bottom.”
“I didn’t slip. It felt as if my ankle caught on something.”
Derek raced back, panting, clutching a soggy hankie.
“Give it to your aunt. There’s electric light up there? Can you manage to turn it on without taking the torch?”
“Yes, of course.” He stepped past Ben and tramped up, clutching the rail on both sides.
A moment later, light flooded down through the trap. Gently, Daisy set about cleaning up the wound on Ben’s head.
“Ouch!”
“Sorry. Try to keep still, darling.”
Meanwhile Alec directed the torch at the floor on the far side of the stair. “Ah.”
Though Daisy couldn’t see what he was looking at, she could guess. “Don’t make cryptic Tom noises,” she said. “Ah” was the favourite monosyllable of his sergeant, Tom Tring, who managed to infuse it with a wide variety of meanings. “Is it what I think it is?”
Alec laughed. “Who’s being cryptic now? Hold on a tick.” He examined the iron coils of the banisters a few steps up. “Yes, it looks as if … Hmm.”
Derek, coming back down in his own socks with a pair for Ben, said, “That’s Uncle Edgar’s butterfly net! We didn’t take it, Uncle Alec,” he added defensively. “Even if we had we wouldn’t be so stupid as to leave it on the stairs.”
Ben jerked his head round to see what they were talking about. “Ouch! Is that what I fell over?”
“Must be,” said Derek. “How on earth did it get there?”
Alec caught Daisy’s eye. “Someone must have thought it was yours and put it there for you. Perhaps it was leaning, and fell over across the step.”
Daisy didn’t venture to mention that absolutely no one in the household could possibly have thought the butterfly net belonged to anyone other than his lordship.
Instead, she said, “Do you two want to find somewhere else to spend the rest of the night? Or are you all right with going back to your own beds?”
Ben looked up at Derek, who assured him, “Everything looks fine. No damage.”
“I don’t mind, then.”
“I’d better put a dressing on your head first. Derek, do you know where the first-aid kit is kept?”
“No, Aunt Daisy.”
Daisy sighed. “I’ll fetch it myself. Go on up to bed, but don’t lie down till I’ve bandaged you, Ben.”
She was halfway along the corridor when Belinda and Frank Crowley came round the corner from the landing. Bel ran towards her.
“Mummy, has something happened? I couldn’t go to sleep after that big thunder crash, and I started worrying about the boys, because lightning strikes the highest place, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, darling. The lightning conductor was the highest point. It gave them a shock—a surprise, I mean—and Ben had a bit of a tumble, but no worse than yours this afternoon.”
“He’s all right?” Frank asked.
“Yes,” Daisy said patiently, hoping the rest of the household wasn’t going to appear with the same questions on their lips.
Geraldine, her housekeeper, a housemaid, Frank as Ben’s guardian—No one else had any reason to know where the boys slept.
No good reason. “I’m just going to get a dressing for Ben’s head.
Daddy’s with him and Derek. Go back to bed, darling, and don’t worry. ”
Frank grinned. “I’ll take that advice as meant for me, too. Thanks for taking care of him.”
She went down to the second floor with them.
They headed for their beds and Daisy continued down to the housekeeper’s room, where the first-aid box had been kept in the same cupboard since time immemorial.
Lint, Germolene ointment to keep it from sticking and to kill germs, and a bandage; sticking plaster might come in handy.
She had a vague feeling that aspirin was not a good idea after a concussion, however slight.
Oh, and the famous bruise ointment, if any was left after the heavy use it had undergone recently. Too many accidents.…
A branch, some kind of reflector, the butterfly net—It was fortunate that Edgar wasn’t the irascible sort. He wasn’t at all likely to blame the boys for breaking his net. He was more likely to blame himself because it was responsible for Ben’s injury.
When she plodded up the circular stairs, she was careful not to brush against the banisters or touch the rail more than was absolutely necessary to keep her balance.
For one thing, she didn’t want blood on her dressing gown.
For another, she wasn’t sure whether Alec would be interested in looking for the fingerprints of whoever had set the trap, though it was probably too late by now anyway.
It must have been a trap. The odd thing, one of the odd things … But she’d consider that later.
She could hear voices—Alec’s, and Ben’s distinctive lilt—but not what they were saying, the floor effectively blurring their words until her head emerged through the trapdoor.
The boys were both in bed, Ben sitting up, Derek already nearly asleep. Alec sat in a chair where he could watch Ben.
“No signs of trouble so far,” Alec assured her.
“Thank goodness.” Daisy neatly bandaged Ben’s head, about the limit of her nursing ability. He looked as if he were wearing a turban. “Do you feel sleepy?”
“Not very.”
“Hop out of bed and stand up for just a minute, Ben,” said Alec. “Do you feel at all dizzy?”
“No, sir.”
“Roll your head a bit. All right? It looks as if you’ve been lucky. Back into bed and try to sleep. Don’t be alarmed if one of us comes and wakes you up in a couple of hours just to check.”
Daisy tucked him in and dropped a kiss on what was visible of his forehead below the bandage. “Sleep well, Ben.”
“Good night, Aunt Daisy, Uncle Alec. Thank you.”
Despite his words, when Daisy glanced back before turning off the light and following Alec down the stairs, he was fast asleep.
“One of us…?” she said, joining him in the corridor.
“I’ll set the alarm clock and you—”
“Oh no, you’ve much more idea of what symptoms you’re looking for. Alec, the net on the stairs, and everything else that’s happened—I don’t understand it. What on earth do you think is going on?”
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
Daisy yawned. “You agree that it’s strange.”
“In the morning,” he said firmly. “I need to sleep on it.”
In spite of distant rumblings of thunder, he slept on it so soundly that the alarm clock didn’t rouse him and it was Daisy who went to check on Ben.
He was less difficult to wake. He seemed perfectly normal to Daisy, but when she returned to her own bed she reset the alarm for another two hours, just in case.