Joan Smith Read Free Page A

spots on your white gown, Gloria,” she began. So wrapped up was she in her melodrama that she assigned to me the heroine’s name. ‘‘When you climb up the gatehouse trellis for me, you must experiment and find the most convenient way of holding the dagger. The teeth would do, or stuck into your waistband, which means you must wear a suit, for these new empress gowns are not good for concealing or carrying a weapon at all.”
    “The teeth, definitely, which means it must not be too large a dagger,” I advised.
    “I have just the thing. I’ll get it and let you try if you can hold it in your mouth. Mrs. Brunton’s Laura was not at all credible in her adventures. I don’t mean Gloria to make such a cake of herself.”
    I sat contemplating what would be a suitable gown for murder while she ran off to find the weapon. When she returned, she had not only a pretty bone-handled knife with a carved blade in one hand, but a bulky sheepdog of a man at her side, “This is Doctor Hill, Valerie. You have heard me speak of Walter. And this is my niece, Valerie Ford, Walter. She has agreed to come home with me and try out those feats you claimed to be impossible for a mere lady.”
    “Miss Ford, a pleasure,” he said, shaking my hand as though I were a gentleman. I like shaking hands, much prefer it to the simpering curtsey usually practiced by my sex. You can tell something about a person by the grip of his hand. Dr. Hill had a firm, indeed a crushing, grip. But then he was a big man. I had to look up to him.
    His general appearance was that of a country squire. There was no elegance at all in the man. His grizzled hair had been allowed to grow to a countrified length without aid of professional barbering. His outfit for an evening call was not the sort seen in finer homes, but a slightly spotted brown afternoon jacket and faun trousers, with dusty Hessians on his feet. He looked like someone’s father.
    “Very happy to make your acquaintance, Dr. Hill. I would not have taken you for a medical man,” I added, for something to say.
    “Just what I always tell him,” Aunt Loo laughed. “But he is one of the best. He had a very fashionable Harley Street practice before he retired here to Hampshire.”
    “I could only tolerate London for a decade,” he confided. “Perhaps it was the address did me in. I ended up prescribing hartshorn and laudanum for bored ladies, so decided to gather up what few resources I had and return to the country to practice real medicine.”
    “He means prescribe hartshorn and laudanum for me,” Loo translated. “I have a touch of rheumatism and a twinge of the migraine and insomnia from time to time. Not enough of anything to be interesting, but my maladies keep me amused.”
    “You look too healthy ever to require my services,” the doctor said to me as he passed to reach the sofa. It was his professional way of mentioning he had noticed I was a little larger than most females.
    “In the normal way, I don’t see a doctor for years at a time, but the activities my aunt has planned for me may provide you a patient,” I told him.
    “I do not suggest jumping the tollbooth,” he said bluntly. “As for the rest of it, I come to see Lady Sinclair has found just what she requires—a lady to do the impossible.”
    The discussion that ensued showed me Dr. Hill was a bosom bow of my aunt. He was privy to not only her alias of Mrs. Beaton, but to all the details of the forthcoming Tenebrous Shadows. He was even slipping into my aunt’s habit of calling me Gloria at one point in the discussion. He was a local man, who had kept his cottage in the neighborhood for a holiday retreat while practicing medicine in London. His association with the family went back into history and continued up to the present. He was aware of certain aspects of her domestic arrangements that she had failed to mention to me.
    “Is Pierre not back yet?” he asked, after a half hour’s talk.
    “Who is Pierre?” I