Escapade by Walter Satterthwait Read Free Book Online Page A

the daughter. The paragon. (Who was wearing a lovely sleeveless little thing in grey silk, scooped at the neck to flaunt her aristocratic throat.)
    ‘There are more? ’ said the Allardyce, turning to her.
    ‘There are three of them,’ said the Honourable Cecily in that plummy voice of hers. ‘There’s Lord Reggie and there are the other two. One’s a woman and the other is a young boy.’
    ‘Cecily’s been listening to MacGregor again.’ This was from Lord Robert, who was smiling at his daughter with a kind of impatient fondness. She sat to his right.
    ‘And who is MacGregor ?’ asked the Allardyce.
    ‘The gamekeeper,’ said Lord Robert. ‘Soundest chap you could ever find at minding deer. But a trifle over-imaginative. A Scot,’ he added, as though this explained everything.
    ‘But he’s seen them, Daddy,’ said the Honourable Cecily. ‘At the pond, down by the old mill. Beneath the willow tree. A woman in a long white dress, holding the hand of a young boy.
    MacGregor says the boy is ten or twelve years old. The two of them stand there, MacGregor says, staring out over the water. Whenever you approach them, they simply vanish.’
    ‘Rubbish,’ said Lord Robert. He turned to the Allardyce. ‘Before MacGregor, no one ever said a word about ghosts down by the pond. Only ghost story here at Maplewhite was the story of the ghost in the East Wing. Been there for centuries, so the story goes. Supposed to be an ancestor. Reginald Fitzwilliam, the third Earl. Exploitive old swine. Worst relic of the feudal system. Got half the girls in the district in the family way. One of the tenants killed him in the end. Enraged father. Jumped out of a tree while Reggie was out riding, landed on Reggie’s neck and snapped it. Snapped his own ankle, as well. He was hanged, of course, poor devil.’
    ‘When was this?’ asked Mrs Corneille.
    ‘It must have been in the autumn,’ said Sir David Merridale, ‘if the tenants were falling from the trees.’
    Sir David fancies himself a wit. He is clever, in a jaded way, and also handsome, in a jaded way; but neither so witty nor so handsome as he believes. I confess that I dislike him. Whenever he says something mildly clever, he glances at me significantly, as though he expected me to hurl myself, simpering, at his aristocratic feet.
    But even more irritating are his un-significant glances. Have you noticed the way that certain men, when they believe themselves unobserved, observe women? They examine them as though the women were offerings, and as though they, the men, were coolly trying to decide whether to accept or reject them. Sir David is one of those.
    Lord Robert answered her, ‘In 1670. Under the Stuarts.
    Charles the Second.’
    Cecily said to her father, ‘But I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts, Daddy.’ Listening closely, one might possibly have imagined that one detected a faint feline purr in Cecily’s aristocratic voice.
    ‘I don’t,’ he said gruffly. ‘A lot of bourgeois rubbish, ghosts. But it’s the ghost in the East Wing I don’t believe in. That's the ghost people have been talking about for ages.’
    ‘Has anyone ever seen him?’ said Mrs Corneille. She’s a widow, stunning and slender and almost unbearably chic.
    Lady Alice smiled at her. ‘He’s quite harmless, Vanessa.’
    ‘He wasn’t always, though,’ said Sir David. ‘According to the stories, no virgin was safe anywhere in the East Wing.’ He glanced at me and faintly smiled.
    ‘Rubbish,’ said Lord Purleigh. ‘Bourgeois fairy tales.’
    Talk of ghosts dwindled along with the chicken, but it was picked up later, and once again by the Allardyce. We were all sitting in the drawing room, where every wall is hung with the most beautiful and probably priceless Belgian tapestries, each depicting scenes from the Rape of the Sabine Women. (You do remember the Sabine Women? That afternoon in the garden of Mrs. Applewhite’s Academy for Young Ladies? I seem to recall a rather