The Corinthian Read online

  ‘What is she doing here?’ asked Pen, unmoved by his strictures.

  ‘Heaven knows! I found her lying on the path. How does one make a female stop crying?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think you could. She’s going to have a fit of the vapours, I expect. And I do not see why you should hug people, if you don’t know who they are.’

  ‘I was not hugging her.’

  ‘It looked like it to me,’ argued Pen.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Sir Richard sardonically, ‘you would have had me step over her, and walk on?’

  ‘Yes, I would,’ replied Pen promptly.

  ‘Don’t be a little fool! The girl had fainted.’

  ‘Oh!’ Pen moved forward. ‘I wonder what made her do that? You know, it all seems extremely odd to me.’

  ‘It seems quite as odd to me, let me tell you.’ He laid his hand on the sobbing girl’s shoulder. ‘Come! You will not help matters by crying. Can’t you tell me what has happened to upset you so?’

  The girl made a convulsive effort to choke back her hysterical tears, and managed to utter: ‘I was so frightened!’

  ‘Yes, that I had realized. What frightened you?’

  ‘There was a man!’ gasped the girl. ‘And I hid, and then another man came, and they began to quarrel, and I dared not move for fear they should hear me, and the big one hit the other, and he fell down and lay still, and the big one took something out of his pocket, and went away, and oh, oh, he passed so close I c-could have touched him only by stretching out my hand! The other man never moved, and I was so frightened I ran, everything went black, and I think I fainted.’

  ‘Ran away?’ repeated Pen in disgusted accents. ‘What a poor-spirited thing to do! Didn’t you go to help the man who was knocked down?’

  ‘Oh no, no, no!’ shuddered the girl.

  ‘I must say, I don’t think you deserve to have such an adventure. And if I were you I wouldn’t continue sitting in the middle of the path. It isn’t at all helpful, and it makes you look very silly.’

  This severe speech had the effect of angering the girl. She reared up her head, and exclaimed: ‘How dare you? You are the rudest young man I ever met in my life!’

  Sir Richard put his hand under her elbow, and assisted her to her feet. ‘Ah – accept my apologies on my nephew’s behalf, ma’am!’ he said, with only the faintest quiver in his voice. ‘A sadly ill-conditioned boy! May I suggest to you that you should rest on this bank for a few moments, while I go to investigate the – er – scene of the assault you so graphically described? My nephew – who has, you perceive, provided himself with a stout stick – will charge himself with your safety.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Pen mutinously.

  ‘You will – for once in your life – do as you are told,’ said Sir Richard, and, lowering the unknown on to the bank, strode on down the track towards the clearing in the wood.

  Here the moonlight bathed the ground in its cold silver light. Sir Richard had no doubt that he would find Beverley Brandon, either stunned, or recovering from the effects of the blow which had felled him, but as he stepped into the clearing he saw not only one man lying still on the ground, but a second on his knees beside him.

  Sir Richard trod softly, and it was not until he had approached to within a few feet of the little group that the kneeling man heard his footsteps, and looked quickly over his shoulder. The moonlight drained the world of colour, but even allowing for this the face turned towards Sir Richard was unnaturally pallid. It was the face of a very young man, and perfectly strange to Sir Richard.

  ‘Who are you?’ The question was shot out in a hushed, rather scared voice. The young man started to his feet, and took up an instinctively defensive pose.

  ‘I doubt whether my name will convey very much to you, but, for what it is worth, it is Wyndham. What has happened here?’

  The boy seemed quite distracted, and replied in a shaken tone: ‘I don’t know. I found him here – like this. I – I think he’s dead!’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Sir Richard, putting him out of his way, and in his turn kneeling beside Beverley’s inanimate body. There was a bruise on the livid brow, and when Sir Richard raised Beverley his head fell back in a way that told its own tale rather horribly. Sir Richard saw the tree-stump, and realized that Beverley’s head must have struck it. He laid his body down again, and said without the least vestige of emotion: ‘You are perfectly right. His neck is broken.’

  The boy dragged a handkerchief out of his pocket, and wiped his brow with it. ‘My God, who did it? – I – I didn’t, you know!’

  ‘I don’t suppose you did,’ Sir Richard replied, rising to his feet, and dusting the knees of his breeches.

  ‘But it’s the most shocking thing! He was staying with me, sir!’

  ‘Oh!’ said Sir Richard, favouring him with a long, penetrating look.

  ‘He’s Beverley Brandon – Lord Saar’s younger son!’

  ‘I know very well who he is. You, I apprehend, are Mr Piers Luttrell?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I am. I knew him up at Oxford. Not very well, because I – well, to tell you the truth, I never liked him much. But a week ago he arrived at my home. He had been visiting friends, I think. I don’t know. But of course I – that is, my mother and I – asked him to stay, and he did. He has not been quite well – seemed to be in need of rest, and – and country air. Indeed, I can’t conceive how he comes to be here now, for he retired to his room with one of his sick headaches. At least, that was what he told my mother.’

  ‘Then you did not come here in search of him?’

  ‘No, no! I came – The fact is, I just came out to enjoy a stroll in the moonlight,’ replied Piers, in a hurry.

  ‘I see.’ There was a dry note in Sir Richard’s voice.

  ‘Why are you here?’ demanded Piers.

  ‘For the same reason,’ Sir Richard answered.

  ‘But you know Brandon!’

  ‘That circumstance does not, however, make me his murderer.’

  ‘Oh no! I did not mean – but it seems so strange that you should both be in Queen Charlton!’

  ‘I thought it tiresome, myself. My errand to Queen Charlton did not in any way concern Beverley Brandon.’

  ‘Of course not! I didn’t suppose – Sir, since you didn’t kill him, and I didn’t, who – who did, do you suppose? For he did not merely trip and fall, did he? There is that bruise on his forehead, and he was lying face upwards, just as you saw him. Someone struck him down!’

  ‘Yes, I think someone struck him down,’ agreed Sir Richard.

  ‘I suppose you do not know who it might have been, sir?’

  ‘I wonder?’ Sir Richard said thoughtfully.

  Piers waited, but as Sir Richard said no more, but stood looking frowningly down at Beverley’s body, he blurted out: ‘What ought I to do? Really, I do not know! I have no experience in such matters. Perhaps you could advise me?’

  ‘I do not pretend to any very vast experience myself, but I suggest that you should go home.’

  ‘But we can’t leave him here – can we?’

  ‘No, we can’t do that. I will inform the magistrate that there is – er – a corpse in the wood. No doubt he will attend to it.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t wish to run away, you know,’ Piers objected. ‘It is the most devilish, awkward situation, but of course I don’t dream of leaving you to – to explain it all to the magistrate. I shall have to say that it was I who found the body.’

  Sir Richard, who knew that the affair was one of extreme delicacy, and who had been wondering for several minutes in what way it could be handled so as to spare the Brandons as much humiliation as possible, did not feel that the entry of Piers Luttrell into the proceedings would facilitate his task. He cast another of his searching looks over the young man,