He Who Whispers Read Free Page B

book.”
    â€˜But there are industries here: milling, and iron-founding, and stained-glass, and leather manufacture, and others I do not investigate because they bore me. I mention them because the largest of the leather manufactories, Pelletier et Cie., was owned by an Englishman. Mr Howard Brooke.
    â€˜Mr Brooke is fifty years old, and his happy wife is perhaps five years younger. They have one son, Harry, in his middle twenties. All are dead now, so I may speak of them freely.’
    A slight chill – Miles Hammond could not have said why – passed through the little dining-room.
    Barbara Morell, who was smoking a cigarette and watching Rigaud in a curious way from behind it, stirred in her chair.
    â€˜Dead?’ she repeated. ‘Then no more harm can be done by …’
    Professor Rigaud ignored this.
    â€˜They live, I repeat, a little way outside Chartres. They live in a villa – grandiosely called a château, though it is not – on the very bank of the river. Here the Eure is narrow, and still, and dark green with the reflexion of its banks. Let us see, now!’
    Bustling with concentration, he pushed forward his coffee-cup.
    â€˜This,’ he announced, ‘is the villa, built of grey stone round three sides of a courtyard. This’ – dipping his finger into the dregs of a glass of claret, Professor Rigaud drew a curved line on the tablecloth – ‘this is the river, winding past in front of it.
    â€˜Up here, some two hundred yards northwards from the house, is an arched stone bridge over the river. It is a private bridge; Mr Brooke owns the land on either side of the Eure. And still farther along from there, but on the opposite bank of the river from the house, stands an old ruined tower.
    â€˜This tower is locally known as la Tour d’Henri Quatre, the tower of Henry the Fourth, for absolutely no reason relating to that king. It was once a part of a château, burnt down by the Huguenots when they attacked Chartres towards the end of the sixteenth century. Only the tower remains: round, stone-built, its wooden floors burnt out, so that inside it is only a shell with a stone staircase climbing spirally up the wall to a flat stone roof with a parapet.
    â€˜The tower – observe! – cannot be seen from this villa where the Brooke family live. But the prospect is pretty, pretty, pretty!
    â€˜You walk northwards, through thick grass, past the willows, along the river-bank where it curves here . First there is the stone bridge, mirrored in a glitter of water. Farther on is the tower, overhanging the moss-green bank, round and grey-black with vertical window-slits, perhaps forty feet high, and framed against a distant line of poplars. It is used by the Brooke family as a kind of bathing-hut, to change clothes when they go for a swim.
    â€˜So this English family – Mr Howard the father, Mrs Georgina the mother, Mr Harry the son – live in their comfortable villa, happily and perhaps a little stodgily. Until …’
    â€˜Until?’ prompted Miles, as Professor Rigaud paused.
    â€˜Until a certain woman arrives.’
    Professor Rigaud was silent for a moment.
    Then, exhaling his breath, he shrugged the thick shoulders as though disclaiming any responsibility.
    â€˜Myself,’ he went on, ‘I arrive in Chartres in May of thirty-nine. I have just finished my Life of Cagliostro , and I wish for peace and quiet. My good friend Coco Legrand, the photographer, introduces me to Mr Howard Brooke one day on the steps of the hôtel de ville . We are different types, but we like each other. He smiles at my Frenchness, I smile at his Englishness; and so everybody is happy.
    â€˜Mr Brooke is grey-haired, upright, reserved but friendly, a hardworking executive at his leather business. He wears plus-fours, which seem as strange in Chartres as a curé’s skirts in Newcastle. He is hospitable, he has a twinkle in the eye, but he