Silence in Court

by Patricia Wentworth

  There was something infectious about the rollicking vigour with which she spoke. Carey let herself go and said in a laughing voice,

  “I don’t suppose it is. But you wouldn’t mind anyhow, would you?”

  Mrs. Maquisten was delighted.

  “No, I shouldn’t—I never have and I never shall. You know, you said that just the way Julia used to say things. I’m glad you’ve got her spirit. I don’t like meek little mice. Wait till you meet my niece Honor—the spi’t and image of a white mouse with pink eyes! Honor King—James’s niece, not mine, I’m thankful to say, but they named her for me, which annoyed me very much when I saw how she was going to turn out. My half-sister called a girl after me too—Nora Hull. She lives here—you’ll meet her presently. She’s a pretty little piece, so my side of the family comes the best out of it.” She quirked up the thin plucked eyebrows. “Honor—Nora—bit of a joke, isn’t it?”

  Carey thought the less she said the better. She let herself laugh.

  Quite abruptly Mrs. Maquisten was as grave as a judge. She folded her right hand over her left and looked down at the glittering rings—diamond half-hoop, diamond solitaire, emerald and diamond cluster, emerald half-hoop with winking diamond points, emerald and diamond marquise covering the forefinger from the second joint to the knuckle. She frowned at the brightness and the colour and said deep and low,

  “Not so much of a joke if you let yourself think about it. How many babies do you suppose would have been named after me if I’d had a few of my own?”

  “I don’t know, Cousin Honoria.”

  The wide mouth twitched into a sudden smile.

  “Nor do I, but I can guess. Sprats to catch a whale, my dear—that’s what those Honorias are. And Dennis Harland is Dennis Honorius!” She gave an abrupt laugh. “I’ll do him the justice to say he’s horribly ashamed of it. Sprats, my dear—sprats. But the whale isn’t caught yet. Oh, lord!” The laughter shook her. “I’m thin to be a whale, aren’t I? That’s where metaphors trip you up. A thin old jewelled whale bedizened with silver, and everyone hopefully throwing sprats!” She stopped suddenly, stared, and said, “Why don’t you laugh?”

  “I didn’t like it.”

  “No sprats of your own?”

  The colour flew scarlet to the roots of Carey’s hair. Her eyes blazed. She stamped her foot and said, “No!”

  Mrs. Maquisten said “Temper,” in an indulgent voice. She put out a glittering hand. “Sorry, my dear—I just wanted to see how you’d react. I’m a horrid old woman—don’t take any notice of me. I expect you’d like to see your room. It’s another floor up.”

  She picked up a little ivory bell-push on a long green flex and pressed it. A bell rang sharply quite near by, and before it had stopped ringing a door which Carey had not noticed opened quite close to the head of the bed and a nurse came in. She was very stiffly starched just as Jeff had said, but she moved without any sound at all. “Nurse Brayle,” said Honoria Maquisten carelessly. “My cousin, Carey Silence.”

  Carey found herself wondering what Nurse Brayle would look like without all the whiteness and the starch. She had never seen anyone whose clothes were so much a part of her. She could not picture the head without its cap, or the neck without its collar, the trim severe figure in anything except uniform. Regular features, grey eyes, a glimpse of dark brown hair. First, foremost, and all the time you would think of Magda Brayle as a nurse. She didn’t seem even to have any age. Twenty-five—thirty—thirty-five—uniform has no age. Magda—curious name—

  Mrs. Maquisten used it now.

  “Magda, just take Carey up to her room, and then come back and get me ready for tea.” She turned to Carey. “Come down when you hear the bell. Tea will be in here.” Her eyes sparkled maliciously. “You must, I am sure, be looking forward to meeting your cousins.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Magda Brayle took Carey up to a pleasant small room on the next floor. The windows looked out to the back and showed lines of brick wall running down from all the other houses to what looked like an old-fashioned mews. The plot belonging to No. 13 was larger than any of the others, being a wide rectangle, with paved work, ornamental conifers, stone seats of a classic pattern, and a fountain where a marble boy struggled with three athletic dolphins. Inside, the room had a comfortable absence of grandeur. Carey didn’t feel as if she could have borne any more brocade and silver. The walls were painted cream, curtains and chair-covers of shiny chintz patterned with oyster shells and blue ribbons, the carpet of natural wool. There were blue cushions and a blue eiderdown.

  She said, “How pretty! But one ought to be about sixteen.”

  If she expected any human response, she didn’t get it, either to the words or to the tentative smile which had gone with them. Nurse Brayle informed her that there was a bathroom next door, and that tea would be ready in about a quarter of an hour. As she turned to go Carey tried again. There must be something under all that starch.

  “I didn’t know that Cousin Honoria was ill. She didn’t say anything about it in her letters. Is she in bed all the time?”

  “Oh, no.”

  Nurse Brayle did not interrupt her progress towards the door. As soon as she had spoken she went out and down the stair without making the very slightest sound. Carey relieved her feelings by shutting the door rather briskly.

  When she came downstairs again the door of Mrs. Maquisten’s room stood open. A young man with a crutch under his arm was just going in, whilst from behind, with flying steps, came a little creature in a green and plum-coloured uniform. Carey got the impression of something as rounded and graceful as a kitten—fluffy short hair in negligent bright curls, wide brown eyes, and carnation colour. She came up with a rush, slipped a hand inside Carey’s arm, and said, “I’m Nora Hull. We’ll both get black marks if we’re late for tea. She hates it.” And with that they were over the threshold together.

  At first glance the room seemed to be full of people. Mrs. Maquisten had left her bed, and sat in state beside the fire in a large brocaded chair. The silver wrap had been discarded for a long robe of emerald velvet trimmed with fur. The rings, the pearls, the earrings caught the light from a great crystal chandelier. The green and silver curtains had been drawn and the room closed in.

  The effect was one of light, brightness, and colour, and, over all, the dominant red of Cousin Honoria’s hair.

  The young man with the crutch had reached her chair and was standing beside her. On the other side of the hearth behind a massive tea equipage was the authentic white mouse of Mrs. Maquisten’s description—a little pale creature with hair of a washed-out flaxen and eyes of a washed-out blue. She was childishly small, but she had no look of youth. She was pouring out tea from a bulging silver teapot which looked much too heavy for her, and when Carey came up and was introduced her hand shook and some of the tea went over the edge of the tray to stain a lacy cloth.

  The large hand of Mr. Jefferson Stewart come over the slight shoulder and took hold of the teapot.

  “You know, that’s much too heavy for you,” he said. “Now I’m the world’s best tea-pourer. You let me take this on.”

  Honor King said “How do you do?” to Carey in a small, distracted voice and shot a nervous glance at her Aunt Honoria. She got a sarcastic one in reply.

  “He can certainly do it a great deal better than you do—that doesn’t set a very high standard.”

  Jeff Stewart was pouring tea in the grand manner.

  “You know, Cousin Honoria, this is a very interesting experience for me. All those yarns about the Victorian woman being so weak and delicate that she hardly ever came out of a swoon—I’ll be in a position to go home and tell them that they’re all ballyhoo. Apart from having families of a dozen or so, which they must have had to want a teapot this size, they’d need to have real good muscle to handle it.”

  “You might give a lecture on the subject,” said Honoria Maquisten drily.

  The young man with the crutch came over and
took a chair by Carey.

  “He’s giving one,” he said. And then, “Nobody’s introducing us, but I’m Dennis Harland.”

  Magda Brayle was handing round the cups. She gave one to Carey now.

  Dennis said, “You’ll have to take saccharine—Mrs. Deeping keeps all the sugar to make jam with. When I’m eating the jam I think it’s worth it, but when I’m drinking the tea I’m not so sure.” He had a pleasant voice, and so much charm that it didn’t really matter what he said. You had the warm, delightful feeling that in talking to you he had achieved a life ambition. The hazel eyes which were so like Cousin Honoria’s were bright with interest and admiration.

  The voice, whatever words it used, was saying all the time, “I love to talk to you.”

  When she looked back afterwards Carey had the strongest impression of intimacy with all these people. It wasn’t that she felt at home with them, or comfortable, or happy in her mind, for she did not. There were moments when she felt most bleakly strange. There were moments when she had the lost-dog feeling and could, with shame be it said, have wept upon Jeff Stewart’s solid tweed shoulder. But there were also moments when a terrifying sense of intimacy touched her. There was the moment when Nora called across the sofa in her light, high voice, “How did you get on at the hospital, Den? Weren’t you to see some bigwig or other this morning? What did he say?”

  Dennis shrugged and flung her one brief sentence.

  “The usual rubbish.”

  Curiously, and entirely, the charm was all gone. He looked dry and cold.

  Nora again: “He doesn’t want to take the foot off, does he?”

  “Why should he?”

  Nora went on talking about people who had had a foot off and people who hadn’t had a foot off, and how wonderful artificial legs were and what a lot you could do with one.

  Dennis Harland didn’t appear to be listening. He began to tell Carey a story which might have been funny, only she couldn’t attend to it.

  It was a little after this that he looked across her to Honor King and said, dropping his voice,

  “So the boy friend’s back.”

  She looked under her pale lashes and then down at her folded hands.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Dennis.”

  “No, of course you don’t. Nasty rough place, the Army—I don’t suppose he liked it a bit. For the matter of that, I don’t suppose they liked him either. How did they get rid of him?”

  Honor said nothing. Her eyelids and the tip of her nose had turned quite pink. She really was dreadfully like a white mouse, but you can’t stand by and see the poor little wretch tormented. Carey was casting about for something to say, when Nora came by and stood for a moment with her empty cup in her hand. She laughed and said to Honor in a light, contemptuous voice,

  “Why don’t you scratch his eyes out? What’s it all about?”

  To which Dennis responded darkly,

  “Too, too Ernest. But hush—we are observed. To be continued in our next.”

  From the other side of the hearth Honoria Maquisten’s dominating voice:

  “What are you whispering about? You haven’t got a hap’orth of manners among you. Jeff Stewart, come over here and talk to me! Honor, get back to the tea-tray! I suppose you can lift the teapot now that it’s nearly empty. And, Nora, you go and get out of that uniform as soon as you’ve finished—it swears at every single thing in the room! And when you’ve got back into civilized clothes again you’d better sit down and write to your husband.”

  Nora’s colour brightened dangerously, making her look so much like a little girl in a rage that Carey caught her breath. If she had really been six years old she might have thrown that empty cup at Cousin Honoria. But you don’t throw cups at twenty-six. At least Carey hoped not, but for one of those revealing moments she wasn’t any too sure.

  As Jeff Stewart crossed over and Honor slipped back into her place, Dennis said in his agreeable low-pitched voice,

  “Don’t let your angry passions rise, or tears of temper fill your eyes.” Upon which Nora banged down her cup and ran out of the room.

  “Pepperpot—isn’t she? It goes with our disastrous hair. Ginger in the hair—pepper in the temper. And if you want the lid to blow right off, you can tell her that Aunt Honoria’s hair is the one legacy that she can be absolutely sure about. On second thoughts, perhaps you’d better not do anything of the sort. I’m saving it up for a really serious row.”

  Carey looked at him curiously. He had the same bright chestnut hair as Nora.

  She laughed and said,

  “But it isn’t red.”

  “Ssh—not a word! The idea that it is goes down awfully well, and we study to please. I’ve often advised Honor to try a good strong henna shampoo and see what it would do for her.” He had raised his voice sufficiently in order to allow this kind remark to reach the tea-table, where it was received with a sniff.

  Carey said in a quick whisper,

  “Why are you so unkind to her?”

  Dennis burst out laughing.

  “Honor, my precious, she wants to know why we’re not being nice to you.”

  Carey felt a most unregenerate desire to smack his face. After giving him a look which made this quite plain, she took her cup over to the tray and bent down with it in her hand.

  “Is he always such a frightful tease?” she said in an easy, laughing voice.

  Honor gave another small sniff. The tip of her nose was pink and shiny. The heavy teapot shook as she lifted it. When she had put it down again and added milk to Carey’s cup she lifted her reddened eyelids and colourless lashes for a moment. They fell again immediately.

  Carey went back to her seat disquieted. It wasn’t possible that you could be disliked like that, right away in about five minutes, by a white mouse of a creature whom you’d never even thought of harming. She told herself that she must have imagined the cold repulsion in that pale lifted glance, but all through Dennis Harland’s talk it kept coming back to her, and every time she liked it less. She found herself asking abruptly,

  “Is Nora your sister? I haven’t quite placed you all yet.”

  He said, “No—we’re all cousins. Aunt Honoria’s papa married again and had a son and daughter—very annoying for Aunt Honoria. The daughter had Nora, and the son had me. Both of them piously bestowed their half-sister’s name upon their brats. You see, grandpapa hadn’t any money to leave—at least not as much as you’d really notice. But Aunt Honoria’s mother was a most impressive heiress, so of course Honoria married Maquisten and about half a million more. Our darling Honor comes in on the Maquisten side. Her mama was Uncle James’s sister—a great deal younger of course. She ran away with a chemist’s assistant or something and got herself cut off without a sixpence. So here we are, a loving, united, hopeful family.”

  Mrs. Maquisten’s voice broke in on a threatening note.

  “What are you stuffing Carey up with? I won’t have it! Do you hear?”

  He turned towards her, laughing and blowing her a kiss.

  “Darling, I was telling her what dutiful nieces and nephews we are. Of course she hasn’t met Robert yet. That’s something for her to live for.”

  As if the name had been his cue, Robert Maquisten opened the door and came in—a thickset man of middle height, dark, with the complexion which comes from a sedentary life. He had a forceful, businesslike air, and the manner of a man who is very much at home. He kissed his aunt, took the chair which Jeff Stewart had vacated, without appearing to notice him, and gave a nod and a casual “Hullo!” to the rest of the party. Introduced to Carey, he dismissed her with a quick uninterested glance. For Magda Brayle who brought him a cup of tea he had no glance at all. In a voice that dominated the conversation he made two remarks about the weather and three about the war, after which he disposed of his tea in rapid gulps and addressed Honoria Maquisten.

  “I really came to have a word with you, if you can spare me the time.”

  The tone was not
quite so deferential as the words. Mrs. Maquisten’s eyes sparkled in appreciation of this. There was mockery in her voice as she said,

  “How very—businesslike!”

  “Well, I want to talk to you about business, Aunt Honoria.”

  “Mine, or yours, Robert?”

  “Well—” he looked down the room—“I don’t know that I’m prepared to go into that in a crowd.”

  Mrs. Maquisten lifted her voice after the manner of a toast-master at a banquet.

  “My lords, ladies, and gentlemen, pray silence for Mr. Robert Maquisten!” At sight of his stiffening face she broke into laughter. “All right, Bob, all right!” Her hands went out with a flash of all the rings. “Shoo, children—I’ve had enough of you!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  As they came out into the corridor, Jeff Stewart put a hand on Carey’s arm.

  “I’ve got to go—I’m meeting a man about a gun, and I’m dining out after that. But you’re lunching with me tomorrow.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I’m telling you. I’ll call for you at twelve, and we’ll go shopping.”

  “I haven’t anything to shop.”

  He sounded pained. “But I have, honey.”

  She tapped her foot on the carpet.

  “You’re not to call me honey!”

  “Sorry, darling—I forgot.”

  The tap was repeated with energy.

  “Or darling.”

  “All right, honey.”

  “Jeff Stewart!”

  Dark blue sparkling eyes met lazy grey ones.

  “All right, all right, let’s start all over again. I call for you at twelve, and you come and help me choose a Christmas present.”

  “People aren’t giving presents.”

  “I’m giving this one, and I’m liable to fall down over it if you don’t come along and help. Maybe I won’t keep it for Christmas. I’ll get it first, and then we’ll see. So there we are. Third time lucky. I’ll be round at twelve.”