Читать книгу A Variety of Weapons - Rufus King - Страница 4

CHAPTER II

A victoria with a pair of stunning bays was waiting at the Black Tor airfield.

There had been little conversation on the plane beyond a few conventionalities offered by Ann to the pilot, who had struck her as being very old and very tired. She had put him down (correctly) as a contemporary of the Wright brothers.

Also, thoughts of Bill had occupied her. Today was Saturday, and next Friday at seven he would show up and marry her. Just breeze in and whisk her away from her packing-box nest on East Thirty-sixth Street and haul her by her raven tresses off to Elkton, or wherever it was that justices of the peace performed such enduring ceremonies with a snap.

Yes, he would.

She had muttered this phrase about seven times before she caught the pilot glancing at her with something more than polite curiosity.

All right, her muttering mind had run on, Bill has left a good, safe, and important job in Washington and signed up with the Marines. So off to Montezuma, with the next stop Tripoli. While she rounded out the picture by becoming the adored little thing he had left behind. While her snapshot would go with him in a watch. Required equipment. He had probably thought of it while getting measured for his uniforms and had called her up. Something to get starry-eyed over when far, far away. Also when awash with vin rouge. A candle glowing in the window. Leave it to Bill. The Sabine touch.

The trouble with Bill was that there wasn’t anything the trouble with Bill. Even in looks the man hadn’t missed a moth-eaten trick: slim flanks, broad shoulders from whose bulwarks he tapered via a washboard stomach to a lean waist, the current mode in faces which involved a patina of rugged virility to temper the too-handsome look, a voice like a deep and confidential bell. And boy, did he know it! He made her sick.

That was the phrase which had definitely terminated all conversation with the pilot. He heard her say after an hour’s silence, and to his utter bewilderment: “He makes me sick.” Then she had clammed up again, and he had spent the balance of the flight in wondering what he had done and in pondering upon the sad traces of congenital idiocy so prevalent in today’s youth. It was with relief that he helped her down from the cabin and turned her over to a uniformed coachman.

The coachman said, “Your luggage will follow in the wagon, Miss Ledrick.”

“Thank you.”

The drive was magnificent over a graveled roadway with the full majesty of the Adirondacks rising around her, and the air carried an exhilaratingly clear odor of cedar and pine.

She said to the coachman’s strapping back, “I thought that there were no roads.”

He turned an urbane profile.

“There are none in the sense of going anywhere. Just roads like this one for connecting the house with the field and service places. We use planes for supplies or for any contact with the outside world.”

“Even in winter?”

“Yes, Miss Ledrick.”

“But isn’t it like living on Mars?”

“My wife has occasionally pointed that out to me.”

“I can imagine that she would.”

“We have our amusements. There’s a theater for the staff where the latest films are shown, an excellent library, a social hall, but—”

“But no new faces.”

“Never, unless the steward makes a replacement or a change.”

“Replacement?”

“Occasionally one of us dies in service. Most of us are of an age.”

“Oh.”

“Being here is like sailing on a ship for a voyage that has no destination.”

“That’s terribly well put.”

“Thank you. I write for relaxation. A brochure or two on the feral in animals with its parallel among the criminal classes. Just ahead is our first view of Black Tor, Miss Ledrick.”

Swift-deepening twilight made the house macabre with its turrets of stone and dark magnificence that presented, instead of a home, a bastion for defense. Ann thought of it as besieged and expected a moat, but there was none, and the victoria stopped on a flagged courtyard before an oaken entrance door which opened and released warm light.

A butler greeted Ann with courteous ceremony and said, “Good evening, Miss Ledrick. I’ll show you to your rooms. The lift is over here.”

Ann followed him across a marble parquet beneath the entrance hall’s beamed ceiling and into an elevator, where he pressed a button for the third floor.

“I’m Washburn, Miss Ledrick. A phone call came through for you this afternoon from a Mr. Forrest in Washington. I explained that your plane would not arrive until now, and he said that he would call you again tonight at eleven.”

“Thank you, Washburn.”

The cage stopped, and Ann followed him along a hallway broken by mullioned windows into a charming living room done in Adam and with a coal fire lazily welcoming on the hearth.

“This door opens into the bedroom,” Washburn said, “and beyond it are the dressing room and bath.”

“Thank you.”

“Cocktails are in an hour on the ground floor in the lounge. Just turn to your left as you leave the lift. Danning will take care of you. She will be here with your luggage. If there’s anything you want in the meanwhile just use the house telephone. Miss Marlow regrets not welcoming you until seven, but this is her hour for feeding the ocelots.”

Washburn smiled, bowed, and left.

So this, Ann thought, was wealth. Great wealth and the key to that kicked-around phrase known as gracious living. And who wouldn’t want it and not be a dope? The thought of her clothes began to appall her. The mouse—that’s what she’d be—in gingham alongside of a woman who had all this and ocelots. Even if she was here only on a job, full social contacts were involved, and Ann remained appalled. It was scarcely a milieu for the simply adequate.

She stood at a window and looked out into the deepening darkness within which firs and pines were sinking and where pressing peaks were flattening into profile against the night sky. She wondered what further outrages Bill had in mind for the telephone call at eleven.

He had probably forgotten to tell her that after he married her next Friday he would divorce her on Saturday. The man was certainly a ball of romance. Just an old-fashioned nosegay fragrant with the tender touch. No, not fragrant. Reeking.

Someone knocked, and Ann said, “Come in.”

A man carried her bags directly into the bedroom and then left. A cheerful-looking middle-aged woman closed the door after he had gone and said, “I’m Danning, Miss Ledrick. I’ll get your bath ready and then put out your things.”

Ann thanked her and looked again at the scene below, drawn back to it by something that puzzled her. She realized that, more clearly in the thickening dusk, thin luminous circlets were growing visible about the tree trunks which lined such stretches of the roadway to the airfield which she could see.

“Danning, what is that?”

“What, miss?”

“Those phosphorescent circles on the trees?”

“They’re bands of luminous paint, Miss Ledrick. We have to observe the black-outs even here, you know.”

“But aren’t they visible from the air?”

“No, the leaves and branches mask them.”

Danning suddenly stood still in the bedroom doorway while her smile flattened, leaving her lips drawn. Then Ann noticed it too: a thin, high note prolonged into a tremolo suggestive of sharp agony. It sifted faintly through the hall door and struck Ann unpleasantly with an impact of shock.

She said, “The ocelots?”

“Oh no, Miss Ledrick. That’s Mr. Marlow. The music room is just below us, and he always likes to play the organ when it takes him. He plays it very loud.”

“When what takes him?”

“Pain.”