Miss Seeton's Finest Hour (A Miss Seeton Mystery)

by Hamilton Crane

  Neither of them noticed Chandler close the door as he retreated to the nearest hidey-hole to join Cox and those others of the team who could be spared to spy on one who might, or who might not, herself be a spy.

  “It is Major Haynes,” the major reassured her, pulling himself together. “But in my job—in this branch of the service—we’re pretty easygoing about uniforms.” He did not enlarge upon either the nature of the job or the branch of the service, and Miss Seeton, who understood the meaning of security, had no intention of asking. “We all know who we are,” the major went on with another smile, “and so long as we do, there are more important things to worry about than spit and polish and hats with scrambled egg on them, as our friends in the navy say.” He recollected himself with a start. “Please, Miss Seeton, won’t you sit down?”

  Miss Seeton sat. Her handbag and gas mask were rather too bulky on her lap for comfort, and she glanced toward the major for permission to put them on his desk, where they could be reached in an emergency. Her glance was distracted by the blotter on his desk—or rather by what lay upon that blotter. Her second glance, followed by a quick frown and then a faint smile, was not the reaction the hidden watchers might have expected. Was she, then, so cool a customer she believed she could talk her way out of anything? Or was she a genuine innocent, honestly puzzled as to how her property had ended up in the Tower?

  “Your sketches, Miss Seeton,” Major Haynes responded at once to the look of enquiry she turned on him, too polite to ask a direct question. “You may be wondering how they have come into my hands when it was to Mr. Steptoe of ...” Damn, he’d forgotten the wretched man’s cover story. It was that shy, enquiring look of hers that had done it.

  “Of the Ministry of Information,” supplied Miss Seeton promptly. “At least, that was what he said,” she added as the major’s shoulders seemed to shake.

  His dawning relief faded. “You didn’t believe him?” he asked as the quick little frown reappeared, and once more faded into a smile.

  “It was hardly my place,” Miss Seeton pointed out in her most courteous tones, “to disbelieve a guest in my mother’s house, although I confess I thought it a little ... odd that a government official should concern himself with my poor artistic efforts—but of course at such times as these, many ... strange things happen. And, naturally, if he was indeed speaking the truth, I would be proud to assist in any way that I could, even though my training is not in commercial art, and I feel sure there must be others better suited to the task than I am. Whatever,” she finished with yet another smile, rather less shy, “that task might be.”

  “Public information leaflets,” Major Haynes reminded her as once more she turned that enquiring look upon him.

  “Yes, of course,” said Miss Seeton, nodding sagely, and with a smile that was almost a twinkle. “Showing people how to fill sandbags, and—and similarly difficult operations.” She spoke with an element of control in her voice that made the major give her a sharp look. “Sketches,” enlarged Miss Seeton, nodding again. “Photographic reproduction can be so very costly, can it not? Even for government departments.”

  Major Haynes was suddenly tempted to wipe his brow. The interview, he suspected, might just not go quite the way he and the others had planned ...

  What was it about this girl that seemed to have everything topsy-turvy, for no good reason that he could see? Apart from the hat—remarkable was the understatement of the century—you could trip over a dozen like her the minute you walked out of the door.

  Or, on second thoughts—that look she gave you was uncomfortably shrewd—perhaps you couldn’t. Honesty, he decided, might be the best policy—insofar as honesty was ever possible in the intelligence world.

  “It seems,” the major remarked with a wry smile, “that it isn’t easy to fool you, Miss Seeton.”

  “I have been a teacher for several years, Major Haynes,” Miss Seeton reminded him, and stifled a sigh for those earlier years when she had hoped that her talent might be ... something more. Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. And the conscientious teacher knows more of human nature—both its depths and its heights—than almost anyone else.

  “A teacher, yes, of course.” The major’s voice expressed his relief as he recognised more familiar conversational territory. He lifted the sketchbooks from the blotter and took up the cardboard folder that had been concealed underneath. “I take it you won’t be too surprised that we know your educational record and professional qualifications,” he went on. “And your family background.”

  “In wartime,” said Miss Seeton with resolution, “it is as well to be prepared for any eventuality. Should you indeed wish to employ me—and for whatever purpose—a charge of carelessness—carelessness in the extreme—would be levelled at you should you fail to ... check up on me.”

  Her clear gaze was almost accusing. “Or even a charge more serious still,” she continued sternly. “Treason, for instance.”

  Behind the walls there was consternation among the hidden watchers. They could mop their brows without being seen—and mop they did. Their quarry was turning the interrogatory tables with a vengeance.

  “Your father’s daughter,” said Major Haynes, “is surely an unlikely candidate for treason.” As Miss Seeton’s eyes brightened with sudden tears and her gaze fell, he coughed, and opened the cardboard folder. “Major Hugo Monk Seeton,” he read aloud. “Volunteer, August 1914—awarded the Military Cross in 1916 at the Somme ...”

  He had been watching Miss Seeton’s hands, clasped on her lap. They twitched and tightened briefly before her gaze lifted again to meet his own. He waited for her to speak.

  “I do beg your pardon,” said the daughter of Major Hugo Seeton, “but it was the Victoria Cross. And Passchendaele, in 1917. I was only a child, but I remember it well ...” She blinked, and shook her head, and now her eyes gleamed with gentle mischief. “So, Major, are you satisfied that I am who I say I am?” asked Emily Dorothea Seeton.

  This time Major Haynes permitted himself the visible luxury of a quick handkerchief across his brow. He tried to believe it was because the room was hot—but his belief in his motives wasn’t very convincing.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Seeton,” he said. “But you understand that we have to be sure.”

  “My father died in 1919,” said Miss Seeton, and once more her eyes were bright. “In the influenza epidemic—he had been badly gassed, as I’m sure you know, and his lungs were never strong ... and then my poor little sister ...”

  Major Haynes waited again. Either the girl was a brilliant actress, or it would be cruel to test her further.

  “Poor Amabel,” said Miss Seeton at last with the hint of a sigh. “She was always so frail—they had hoped so much for a second child, and ... And my poor mother almost wore herself out nursing them both. She refused to have them taken from the house, as my father had such a distrust of hospitals after ...”

  “Yes, of course,” said the major quickly.

  “I was rather too young,” said Miss Seeton, looking back twenty years to her nine-year-old self, “to be of any great help in a sickroom, and of course there was the additional worry that I, too, might become ill. My mother sent me to stay with Cousin Flora in Kent, and—and I never saw either my father, or Amabel, again.”

  “So after your return you remained in Hampstead,” prompted Major Haynes. “You went to school there, attended art college in London, and followed this with various local teaching posts.”

  “My mother is not strong,” said Miss Seeton. “She has had a sad life—and she would, I think, have missed me had I studied away from home. And as I have had but slight inclination towards matrimony ...” She cleared her throat. “As your files surely explain,” she concluded, and once more that mischievous gleam appeared in her eyes.

  “Talking of explanations,” said Major Haynes, who felt that matrimony and the disconcerting Emily Seeton were indeed improbable partners, “there are one or two of your drawings that are of con
siderable interest—if you could bear with me a moment ... This one, for instance.” He had closed the folder of personal details and pushed it to one side, pulling one of the sketchbooks towards him and opening it at the first marked page. “It’s an unusual composition,” observed Major Haynes with feeling.

  Miss Seeton studied the sketch for a moment. “The zoo,” she said, and then frowned. “At least, that’s how it started out—but there was something about the young woman in the refreshment kiosk that reminded me of little Miss Brown at college, who used to make us chuckle with a comic verse during life classes—because it was such a hot day ...”

  The date on the sketch was 19th June 1940.

  “After Mr. Churchill’s stirring speech the day before,” Miss Seeton explained, “I thought it only fitting that the young people of England—certainly, those with whom I had some association—should be given the chance to play their part. To—to bear themselves with as much ... fortitude, to show themselves as resolute, as their elders. With so many parents taking a stand and refusing to evacuate their children a second time, there is plenty of work for those like myself who are used to dealing with the young, and I have arranged several little trips and outings over the past weeks—as your files no doubt tell you,” she finished with another gleam of mischief.

  “Well ...” began Major Haynes, and said no more.

  Miss Seeton nodded. “We have been to Hampton Court, and Hyde Park—where I fear several children took strong exception to the Peace League representative at Speakers’ Corner, and I had to deliver a—a little lecture about freedom of speech and the right to make up one’s own mind before they could be persuaded to listen quietly.” Miss Seeton’s cheeks were pink as she pressed on: “While any right-minded person must surely agree that peace is preferable to war, there are some wars, regrettably, that—that have to be fought for the sake of—of principle. Bullies,” said Schoolteacher Seeton, “must be stopped.”

  She sat up straight on her chair and shook her head as she tried to find the words. “It is,” she said earnestly, “most important, I feel, that young people should learn as soon as possible that we in this country are—are upholders of the right to freedom. And if that right means allowing others to stand on soapboxes in a public place to deliver what I, for one, find a—a most unwise message, then they must be allowed to stand there, or we will be as bad as the Nazis. And so I explained to the children.”

  “Hampton Court!” cried Major Haynes without warning. Behind the wall the hidden watchers jumped quite as high as did Miss Seeton. He turned hurriedly to one of the other marker slips in the sketchbook and held out the page marked 22nd May 1940 showing what Cox had said was a dynamo, and the trapezoid scribble Aylwin had suggested might be a circuit board. “Would this, by any chance, be your attempt at working out the plan of the maze?”

  Miss Seeton twinkled at him. “Have you read Three Men in a Boat?” she countered. “Such an amusing book, and of course had I been on my own, it would hardly have mattered, but with the responsibility of so many children I thought it better to try to avoid the experience of Mr. Harris and his cousin—even if my strong suspicion is that the children might have thoroughly enjoyed losing themselves in so spectacular a fashion.” She was twinkling again as she went on. “Their parents, however, might with justification have been less than amused had our party returned home in any way ... reduced in number, and so, as we walked, I tried to sketch out our path.”

  Major Haynes remarked that it must have been a tricky task, in the circumstances.

  Miss Seeton nodded. “Indeed it was, for there were a good many dead ends and false turnings, and then some of the children grew rather excited and started running ahead. Had I run after them I would, of course, have had to leave the slower children behind, and at least I knew that there was only one way out, where they had been told, if they found it, to wait until the rest of us arrived, if we ever did. And only one way to the centre,” she added. “If we ever managed to find that.”

  “Er—did you?” asked the major, grinning.

  “Eventually.” Miss Seeton’s answering smile might well have been, in a young woman less genteel, another grin. “And the children were so tired with all the running that they were extremely well behaved on the journey home, even if some of the boys did not allow me to forget that I had promised to take them to see Faraday House—it is not far from the palace, and they are so interested in cats’-whisker wirelesses and electricity and—and so forth.”

  “And dynamos,” murmured Major Haynes, looking with new understanding on Miss Seeton’s doodled coils and crossings-out. “Dynamos ...”

  “Exactly. He invented them, you see,” Miss Seeton informed him brightly. “The children chattered so much, and of course I looked him up. Michael Faraday, 1791 to 1867, considered by most authorities to be the greatest of all experimental physicists—let me see. Dynamos, and electric motors, and—dear me, I’ve forgotten—something to do with change ...”

  “Change. Transformers?” prompted Major Haynes, who felt he might be starting to fathom the workings of Miss Seeton’s decidedly unusual, and certainly lively, mind.

  “Transformers, yes,” said Miss Seeton, grateful for the reminder. “And as it would take us only a little out of our way, it seemed a pity not to encourage their enthusiasm by going home from the palace via the green, which I was only too pleased to do.”

  “You take your duties seriously, Miss Seeton,” remarked Major Haynes with approval. “All these trips around and about require time and effort on your part to plan, to say the least of it.” Miss Seeton blushed and murmured modestly, but Haynes pressed on with his compliment. “Escorting a bunch of pesky brats who are acting up because they’re bored would be my idea of purgatory,” he told her with obvious sincerity. “The trick is to keep them interested, isn’t it? Which is easier said than done, I know—but a good teacher can interest his or her pupils in anything. Even politics,” he added with a smile, and held his breath as he waited for her reply.

  It was offered in a tone of wry amusement as Miss Seeton’s blush faded. “Speakers’ Corner is noted more for its oratory than for—for the sense of its political opinions,” she said, twinkling at him again. “Except that even the oratory all too often lacks any sense, if one pays close attention. We only went once, you know, for balance, as one might say. I think it most unlikely they will wish to pay a second visit.” She smiled. “I have advised them to listen to Mr. Churchill’s wireless broadcasts if they wish to hear oratory at its best ... for I think,” she said with every appearance of sincerity, “that history will mark him down as perhaps this country’s greatest-ever prime minister, don’t you?”

  While the invisible watchers noted that nothing in Miss Seeton’s words, tone, or demeanour hinted that she might hope history, as written by Adolf Hitler, would never be given the chance to acknowledge the greatness of Prime Minister Churchill, Major Haynes seized thankfully upon the conversational lead. “Like Pitt?” he asked.

  The watchers pricked up their ears.

  “Or Palmerston, or Gladstone ... Or Walpole?”

  And once again the major held his breath as he waited for her reply.

  chapter

  ~ 8 ~

  “WALPOLE,” ECHOED MISS SEETON, as a fleeting pucker appeared once more between her brows before turning into a smile that Major Haynes, who could see it most clearly, thought looked slightly sheepish. The hidden watchers, watching from a less favourable angle, saw it as evidence of guilt ... or of over-confidence, perhaps, as she tried to spin him another of her remarkable yarns.

  If it was anything, it was guilt.

  Or embarrassment, at least.

  “It’s so—so silly,” confessed Miss Seeton, with a blush and a second smile inviting Major Haynes to share her wry amusement at her silliness. “One had to learn them all at school by heart, of course, like tables, and weights and measures, and kings and queens. The majority are easy, for naturally Pitt the Younger comes after Pitt
the Elder, and there was only one Gladstone—but for some reason I can never remember which is Hugh and which Horace, especially when there was Robert, who really was.” She frowned again. “Prime minister, I mean,” she went on in a slightly less confident tone. “When the other two were both writers—and in different centuries, which ought to make it easier, but for some reason does not ...”

  “Now you come to mention it,” said Major Haynes, “I’m not so sure myself. Strawberries come into it somewhere, I think—” He brought himself up sharply. What on earth had the girl done to him, making him babble nonsense almost as convoluted as her own?

  “Strawberry Hill Gothic,” supplied Miss Seeton happily. “Yes, indeed—which means that that was Horace, not Hugh—the same short ‘o,’ you see, as in Gothic, which should make it easy to—oh, dear.”

  “The same as in Robert,” said Major Haynes, who had been coincidentally struck by the same realisation that Miss Seeton’s little mnemonic was not as foolproof as she had hoped. “But never mind that now. What,” he went on cautiously, “is the connection with diamonds?”

  “I rather think that was his grandfather,” Miss Seeton told him with only slight hesitation. History was not, after all, her subject, and her school days were some years behind her. While she would, whenever possible, look things up, she now had so many calls on her time that it was often far from possible.

  “Pitt the Elder, that is—or perhaps his father,” she amended. “I recall that he bought it from an unscrupulous person who had no legal right to sell it, and sold it in turn to the royal house of France.” She stifled a sigh for the current fate of that newly conquered country. “Napoleon.” she continued, her thoughts turning automatically to an earlier conqueror, “had it embedded in his sword hilt—which is why he bore the soubriquet of Diamond Pitt—the elder’s grandfather, I mean, because he was a nabob, not a politician. If he was not his father, that is,” she ended with a hint of breathlessness.