“Da Silva’s a little that way,” Curtis observed ruefully.
“Do you think so?” Fen considered it. “I don’t quite agree. That is, Mr. da Silva laughs at everyone, but he hopes someone else will get the joke too, don’t you think?”
Curtis thought about that for a few moments, then said, “Yes. You’re rather sharp.”
Fen dimpled. “But Mr. Holt isn’t like that. One was not supposed to get the joke, and if one did, it wasn’t funny and it only made one feel worse.”
“Was he offensive to you?”
“Oh, well.” Fen paced forward, hands behind her back. “It’s not that I mind flirting, you know. Mr. da Silva is the most dreadful flirt, and it’s wonderfully amusing and desperately unserious. But Mr. Holt flirted rather horribly. Not in public, that was unremarkable, but alone. He looked at one so. One felt as though he knew things he shouldn’t.” She paused. “And I suppose he did, of course, with their spying. How utterly vile.”
Curtis quelled his curiosity as to what Holt could have known about Fen. It was none of his business.
“Well, we’ve a chance to put an end to it,” he observed. “We can have people up here to catch the brutes red-handed, if I can just make a telephone call without the operator eavesdropping.”
“Yes, of course.” Fen twinkled up at him. “I think I might be able to help you there.”
They weren’t able to act straightaway. First Lady Armstrong came out to meet them, giving them a roguish look and declaring that she had come to replace Miss Merton as chaperone. Fen went into peals of apparently unforced laughter at the weak witticism. Curtis, watching Lady Armstrong, saw strain in her eyes.
They were taken off to join the party. Most hostesses offered a relentless programme of entertainments for a country-house party; Lady Armstrong’s popularity—and, in fact, the success of the blackmail venture—sprang from her willingness to allow guests to disappear off in twos during the day, as well as the general practice of arranging rooms to facilitate encounters at night.
Nevertheless, there was a certain level of appearance that had to be upheld. The guests of the reduced party, minus James, were gathered to try their hands at archery, since Sir Hubert had installed a range, and this was a sport enjoyed by both sexes. Curtis took part gamely. The bow would have been almost impossible for him to handle even if he’d been paying attention, which he was not, but at least he needed no excuse for his off-target shots.
After a couple of hours that might, under other circumstances, have flown by, they were led in for lunch. Curtis cursed Lady Armstrong’s incessant fussing: when would the blasted woman let them alone? He was horribly aware of Daniel undefended, perhaps ill, perhaps worsening; Pat Merton, waiting alone—armed, but what if James Armstrong tracked her down? Would she have the nerve to shoot? And the clock was ticking. There would be very little chance of help arriving today, now, and the later he called, the longer it would take.
Curtis had been trapped by Boer forces in a South African kraal, lost behind enemy lines for two days without water, and treed by an enraged hippopotamus, which had been a great deal less amusing than it sounded. He didn’t remember any of those times with fondness, but this house party was beginning to wear his nerves thinner than all of them.
“Do try the spiced beef, Mr. Curtis,” Lady Armstrong said. “Cook makes it to a South African recipe, I believe.”
“What do they eat in South Africa?” Mrs. Lambdon asked. “Zebras and things, I suppose?”
Curtis was dealing with that when the door opened and a rather hot-looking James Armstrong entered.
“You’re late, boy,” said Sir Hubert, with a frown.
“I’m sorry, pater, everyone. I went for a walk, lost track of time.”
Curtis doubted that. He suspected James would have been up to the caves where he would have found—well, with luck, nothing. He would be wondering where Daniel was, where Holt was. He would, Curtis assumed, be aware that a bicycle was missing and thus that Holt had never come back from his trip.
Was he looking for Daniel? Did he have men out? In South Africa there were trackers, Bushmen who could follow spoor across miles of apparently featureless ground. The wizened, scrub-haired man that they had called King George would have been able to follow Curtis’s tracks from the caves to the folly at a running pace, and would have known he was carrying another man too. Curtis hoped to hell that Peakholme’s beaters didn’t have those skills.
James settled at the table after another word of rebuke from his father. He looked distracted and concerned.