Walk with Care by Patricia Wentworth Read Free Book Online

was he, ages older than his fifteen-year-old self, and his father and mother gone, and that old Cousin Emily was still living up in Middleham in the same house. She had been living in it for an odd eighty years or so, and she probably still locked up at nine and believed that everyone in the house was asleep by ten. She was the only relation he had in the world. He wondered who got out of her scullery window nowadays, and with that he swung himself over the sink and shut the window behind him.
    Mr Mannister’s scullery was not so immaculate as Cousin Emily’s had been. It smelt of grease and stale food.
    The servants lived out, with the exception of old James the butler who slept at the top of the house. Jeremy’s burglary was not, therefore, a very risky one. He had only to go up the kitchen stairs, cross the hall into the library, and collect his notes. He wondered whether he should take off his shoes, and then, quite fantastically, discovered that his pride jibbed. Whatever happened, or didn’t happen, he wasn’t going to be found walking about Mannister’s house in his stocking feet. There wasn’t an ounce of logic in it, but there it was.
    He need not have troubled. The house was good sound eighteenth-century work, one of those solid Georgian houses which put modern building to shame. Its stair treads did not creak, and its doors opened and closed again as silently now as on the day they had first been hung.
    Jeremy reached the library without event, ran through his notes, and turned to the book-shelves to verify those quotations with which Mr Mannister proposed to decorate his speech. There was one from Timon of Athens about giving to dogs what was denied to men. He turned the pages of a highly ornamental Shakespeare, one of an imposing row of prizes. Here it was: “Hate all, curse all: show charity to none … give to dogs what thou deniest to men.” Then, for a contrast, a jingle of Tommy Moore’s: “Let Sympathy pledge us. …” Hang Mannister! He never forgot a line outright, and he never could finish one. Well, here was Moore:
    â€œLet Sympathy pledge us, through pleasure, through pain, That, fast as a feeling but touches one link, Her magic shall send it direct through the chain!”
    Mannister had worked up to a peroration on International Contacts, depicting them as so close that a drop of the virus of hate in the veins of one nation must surge in fever through the veins of all the rest, and impulses of fear and anger or of generosity and affection, were irresistibly communicated, devastating or ennobling millions who knew nothing of the causes which shattered or exalted them.
    Jeremy pushed Moore back into his place, turned round, and was struck motionless. The door was opening. He was at the far end of the long room with a light just over his head. The switch was by the door. The door was opening. It made no noise and it opened very slowly. There was no light at that end of the room.
    The door swung slowly in until it made a straight line with the jamb. On the dim threshold there stood a girl in her night dress. She had a lot of dark hair tumbling in curls about her shoulders. Her left hand hung down holding something. Her right hand was dropping slowly from the door. It was like a slow-motion picture. Her arm came back to her side. She stood there with her eyes wide open, staring at the light and at Jeremy.
    Jeremy recovered himself. He had not the remotest notion who she might be, or what she could possibly want. He said,
    â€œI’m Mr Mannister’s secretary. I hope I didn’t startle you.”
    He began to walk towards her, but as soon as he moved, her hands went up in a groping manner and she turned and went back into the darkness of the hall. There was a sound of something falling—something small. It was the only sound that she had made.
    Jeremy stopped for a moment, and then went on to the door. There was a little dusky space just