Joan Smith Read Free Page B

asked.
    “Why, he is my late husband’s cousin, my dear,” she told me. “He has been staying with me these six months. Pierre St. Clair, from the French side of the family. He was smuggled out of Paris as a very infant during the reign of terror, and raised on a farm in Normandy. He was schooled in a Jesuit seminary and sent to England last year to wait out this horrid business of Napoleon. When he goes back, he will be a comte or something of the sort, but meanwhile he calls himself plain Monsieur Pierre St. Clair. He is a pretty boy; he will be some company for you while I am writing during the day. I write in the morning while I am fresh. I used to lie in bed till noon, but Walter says this is much healthier for me, to be bent over a desk.”
    “What I said, Miss Ford, is that it is good for your aunt to have a hobby, an interest in life. Well, the money does not go amiss either, for that matter.”
    My surprised stare was due to a hint that money was required in this house of opulence. The doctor was sharp enough to notice it at once. “We can all use a little spare cash,” he added, then hastened on to change the subject. “So Mr. Sinclair has taken Pierre to Wight. He will like that. It will be a nice trip for the boy.”
    “You never mentioned a word about Pierre St. Clair to us at home, Auntie,” I said.
    “I was afraid your mama would dislike your coming when I had a young fellow staying here at the house. She is a trifle old-fashioned in her ways, and Pierre is French, to make it all the worse. He has found an English strain in his background now and insists he is English, but he is very French, and I did not like to mention him to your mama. He slipped my mind once we got back home and discussing my book. The other fellow we are speaking of is Welland Sinclair, the fellow you are going to murder for me.”
    Dr.  Hill smiled at her strange way of speaking. “Mr. Sinclair is staying at the gatehouse, then,” I mentioned, knowing my victim’s lair by this time. “Is he also a cousin of your late husband?”
    “Yes, some relation. He only came a month ago. He lives in Hereford, stays right at Tanglewood with Lord St. Regis. St. Regis wrote asking me if I had a private, quiet spot he could put up in. He is a scholar, Valerie, writing up a treatise on ghosts.”
    A surprised laugh escaped my lips, at the incongruity of a scholarly ghost treatise. “On the occurrence of ghosts in English literature over the centuries,” Dr. Hill explained.
    “Like Hamlet’s father,” I said, understanding the subject properly now.
    “Exactly. Also in Macbeth, and something crops up in Julius Caesar. Shakespeare trafficked a good deal in ghosts. Young Sinclair has a thick volume of research he is working on. I think the lad works too hard. I am worried about his eyes. He won’t let me look at them, though he complains often enough.”
    “Mr. Sinclair has to wear green glasses,” Loo said. “I don’t think it is good for him to do so much close work as he does. It would be a pity to lose them—his eyes I mean. I am losing the sight of my eyes. I can no longer thread a needle to save my life. It makes me furious. And I am going deaf too, or else the whole world has taken to whispering. Except for Walter. He always shouts up good and loud for me.”
    “I shall prescribe you a tonic, my dear Louise. What you suffer from is not blindness and deafness, but only a fit of pique that you are no longer young.”
    “Prescribe me a new pair of legs and set of teeth while you are about it,” she begged. “My body is worn out, plain falling apart. I wish I could get hold of a new one and start over again, with my brain intact. Do you think there is anything in this reincarnation, Walter?”
    He smiled apologetically to me, but it was clearly his habit to humor Aunt Loo. He entered willingly into a discussion of this possibility, while I sat deciding how I would like to come back, if I got another whirl out of life. A