The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris by Leon Garfield Read Free Book Online

even his lagging behind, would surely have seemed unusual and so might have led to the horror of discovery. So he threw himself into the search with extraordinary vigor and invention. But all the while, under this dazzling counterfeit, his brain was steadily at work.
    At last it became tragically plain to the Harrises that Adelaide was not going to be found, and in spite of the younger Harris’s urgent entreaties that they should look just once more, they gathered wearily in the front parlor to decide on what next should be done.
    â€œBostock,” said Dr. Harris gravely. “I’ll have to call Bostock.”
    At this, the son of the house started in horrible alarm, till he understood that his father had meant Bostock the sea captain—his friend’s parent—who was a Justice of the Peace. So Captain Bostock was fetched from his bed and informed of the unnatural disaster that had struck at the home of Dr. Harris.
    He listened, yawning and frowning the while and fixing his piercing blue eyes upon one member of the family after another as they broke in with uncontrollable agitation. This gaze of his which, in its day, had subdued mutinous sailors and almost the sea itself, had the effect of calming the parlor. Everyone dropped their eyes. But not the younger Harris, whose mounting dread of discovery would have given him strength to outstare St. Peter himself. He sat and glared with terrible fixity at Captain Bostock, being entirely convinced that one turn of his head would reveal its guilty contents. Then, little by little, as the sea captain talked, his dread diminished and his brain resumed its underground activity.
    Though Captain Bostock was, as he himself freely admitted, a sturdy, straightforward and even blunt fellow, many years on the bench had taught him a great deal. He was, he owned with a sigh, no stranger to the webs of deceit in which men raveled themselves. In his time he had come upon many affairs as curious as the disappearance of Adelaide. He did not say this with any idea of belittling the Harris family’s grief, but merely to establish an authority over it.
    Nonetheless, Mrs. Harris looked plainly resentful at what she took to be Captain Bostock’s insinuation that that they were all making a great fuss over nothing. The sea captain, anxious to correct the false impression, hastily admitted that there were certain aspects of the Adelaide affair that distinguished it from the commonplace.
    In his opinion—for what it was worth—it was not so much the disappearance of Adelaide that was extraordinary, but the
appearance
of the unknown infant in her place. He took it for granted, he said, in view of his long friendship with Dr. Harris, that the family were not mistaken and the infant was not their own. Here Mrs. Harris could not be restrained from telling the sea captain that his long friendship with Dr. Harris might go to the devil, a mother knew what was her own child and what was not, and that the newcomer was male which, somehow or another, seemed to her the worst thing of all. Then she began to sob and Captain Bostock said, “Madam, madam,” several times in an effort to atone for his unlucky remark. At last Mrs. Harris was brought to a temporary calm and Captain Bostock admitted cautiously the situation was one that called for an inquiry of
peculiar
delicacy . . .
    The younger Harris’s heart leaped and thundered. The very word “inquiry” tolled like the bell of doom inside his breast. Nor was what followed any less alarming. He sat, cold and deathly, as the consequences of his and Bostock’s experiment in Natural History grew and grew till it was like a monster whose tentacles reached into every corner of the living world.
    Naturally, Captain Bostock would institute inquiries (that terrible word again!)—and here he tapped the side of his weathered nose down which ran a neat, straight scar—but he would advise Dr. Harris to take