The Satan Sampler

by Victor Canning

  “I hope you don’t mind. I was just poking around and admiring myself in this lovely mirror.” The acting bit, but she knew it was going over quite naturally.

  He said, “What will it be?”

  Glancing at the tray she said, “Pink gin, please. With ice.”

  When he brought it to her, he said, looking over her shoulder at the mirror, “Yes, charming, isn’t it? A Seyton brought it back from Waterloo. He was on Wellington’s staff. Went through the whole day without a scratch. Charmed life, but not for long. A year later one of the farm dogs went rabid and bit him. He died of hydrophobia.” He smiled—and she liked him when he did for it lighted up his face—and added, “At least that’s the story.”

  “Poor man.” She raised her glass to him and sipped, and went on, “You said you had something to tell me?” She walked to the window seat and sat down. Outside the sky was a glowing furnace from the sun already hidden below the hills.

  “Oh, yes. Well, I’ve been in town for a few days. I went to see your publisher. You know the drawings you showed me?”

  “So?”

  “You know what I’m going to say?”

  “Of course I do. I never doubted that you were the kind that just said things and then forgot them because they were only guff to fill awkward gaps in talk. But I didn’t realize that you were so quick off the mark, Mr Seyton.”

  “Well, I was up there and had an hour to spare. I’ve bought them. Do you mind?”

  “On the contrary. I’m delighted if they’re going to be here. Maybe not in the same room—but close to far more exalted company.” A nice speech, she told herself, but genuine. And, for God’s sake, why should she not be pleased? She liked a man who knew what he wanted and went for it. Most of them today horsed around watching the effect and waiting for applause. Even in bed the moment it was over, saying, ‘Was I good?’, I . . . I . . . I—always bloody I.

  “I’m so pleased you’re pleased,” he said. “It was a bit pushing really, but I must confess I’m rather like that. See something that’s good and I must have it.”

  She stood up and, to cover her sudden surge of emotion, moved so that she stood with her back to him looking at a framed sampler which was fitted into one of the wainscoting panels. She said, “I see nothing wrong with that if you can afford it. But what happens when you see something you want and can’t afford it?”

  He laughed. “I save up my pennies until I can.”

  She heard him move and he came up behind her as she studied the sampler which—despite her emotion—had now attracted her attention. He was far from close to her physically, but that made no matter because she knew what was happening to her; the opposite to the mental and physical stir that Kerslake and others could rouse. To give herself breathing space she said, “You’ve told me about the Wellington one. What about this one?” She nodded at the sampler and then turned to face him.

  “Oh, that. She was a distant great-aunt. A rebel. Chip on her shoulder. Great beauty. She lived just simply for what there was in life with no thought of the hereafter.”

  He gave her that big, masculine grin and he put a hand on her shoulder with the lightest of touch and reached past her with his free hand and said, “It covers a dodgy bit of business. It’s really the front of a small cupboard. Years ago there was a little concealed peg you had to press, but that’s gone. Now you’ve got to use your finger nail. Like this.”

  Smiling at her he inserted the tip of his first finger nail into the wainscoting join and pulled the sampler away from the wall on its hidden hinges.

  “Very neat.” Not only the sound but the words she knew were banal, but she could not help that. The man was having a familiar—but long distant—effect on her.

  “I think—or so they say—it used to be a wig cupboard. Not used for anything now.” Looking at her, ignoring the little cupboard, he went on, “She’s buried—Sarah Seyton that is—in the chapel. She couldn’t avoid that. You must go and have a look at her memorial stone. There was no deathbed repentance. No last-minute reaching for grace or hope. She went out crying woefully against the great darkness into which she was going.”

  “At least she was consistent. No fickle, mind-changing woman. A familiar slur against our sex.”

  Seyton smiled. With a touch of his hand on her elbow he moved to the fireplace and they sat down. Looking at her in silence for a moment or two, liking her and knowing his admiration for her talent, he hesitated to speak what was in his mind and then decided that he must. He said lightly, “A chatty sort of fellow, your publisher . . . not everyone’s cup of tea, I should say. Do you agree?” He smiled to cover a sudden embarrassment.

  Georgina guessed at once what might have happened because it had happened before with others. Her publisher was an inveterate gossip. She decided to gamble that her instinct was right. So, to ease any diffidence in Seyton, she gave him an opening which he could or could not develop according to the dictates of his own nicety.

  She said, “My publisher is a great old gossiper. Not the kind to be trusted with a secret—however great or small.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I think you know why, don’t you? My father. But it doesn’t upset me.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It has happened to me before. Sometimes just because people remember. There’s a kind which takes a vicarious pleasure, or even concern, over other people’s misfortunes and just the name will trigger their memory bank. In your case—I would say not. But my gossipy old publisher, with your fat cheque in his hand, would not have been able to resist filling in a little the background of a protegee so profitable. Are you with me or have I misread that thoughtful pause after you had sat me down here?”

  Seyton laughed suddenly, and said, “My God, you’re as good as a witch.”

  “No witch. Just recognizing a now familiar situation. My father, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, don’t worry. Or rather you shouldn’t worry. Your family has been liberally sprinkled with men and women who from conscience or desire have cried out, not only against the great darkness waiting for them, but also the great darkness which in life gathered round them. That’s what my father did. He worked for the Ministry of Defence. A nice, kind, gentle man whose conscience suddenly grew too big for his comfort. That’s one way of putting it. Another is that he suddenly went loopy. God knows. But he got himself into a mess—and now he’s paying for it.” She laughed, genuinely knowing she was safe with him, but wondering when they knew whether they would give her the relief of pulling her out of all this, though knowing they would not if she could turn it to advantage, which was what she now guessed was going to happen despite herself. She added before he could speak, “I shan’t poach your game or steal treasures from the Hall. I just——” her voice rose “——bloody well wish it hadn’t happened for his sake.”

  He put out a hand at this and rested it on hers.

  “For God’s sake! What do you think I am? I just wish the silly old fool hadn’t told me. But I just couldn’t stop him. Here——” he took her empty glass and went to the tray of drinks. Over his shoulder, he said, “You went too fast for me. Yes, I was going to mention it. Simply because I believe in honesty. I could tell the silly old fool probably regaled everyone with the story. Some kinds are like that. Colourful background stuff to the author’s or artist’s life. How the devil you could read my mind so quickly . . . Yes, I see. Because it’s happened so often. Well. . .” He came back and gave her the drink, smiling down at her. “Just forget it. And if you want to poach my game, please do so.”

  Taking the drink, she knew an overwhelming desire to kiss the hand which offered it. Nothing to do with bloody Birdcage. Just to do with her and his transparent decency; and knowing too that in all probability at the last moment he would never have made any mention of her publisher’s gossip, might have decided to but would have stopped at the point of speech. To calm her own mood and ease his, she said, “And the treasures at the Hall?”


  He smiled. “When I get the Hall back—which I’m damned well going to do—I’ll find something for you.”

  “That’s going to be some time, isn’t it? What can you do but sit it out?” She spoke quite naturally, but hating herself because that innocent muddler her father was where he was, and because of him she was here with her part to play still. Loathe it or not, she knew that every part of their conversation would have to go to them . . . Kerslake who undressed her in his mind, Quint with his tiny kitchen, and the stained paperback of Escoffier sauces, who, too, undressed her imaginatively but in a nicer way, and then all the others—and sod the lot. But not this man. She knew that he could have what he wanted from her . . . that not only she, but he, had all that to offer which was so banally wrapped up in the overworked, shabby, tired word love.

  She drove back to her bungalow, taking a long route, giving herself time to calm down and to find again that larger part of her posing self so that she could telephone London and pass on to them her version of what had happened between them . . . all the obvious truth but none of the essence of her feelings or—less certain—his. And one thing she knew for certain was that they would not take her off this assignment because he knew about her father. Sometime, somehow, it might work to their advantage they would hope.

  As she eventually turned into the little drive entrance of the bungalow, Seyton came back into the room where they had been having their drinks carrying the tray of cold supper which Mrs Shipley had left for him. Setting it down on a small table before the fire, he went to the dining room and brought back a decanter of red wine from the sideboard. He was about to sit down to his meal when he noticed that the Satan Sampler wig cupboard was partly open still. He went to close it but as his hand rested on the sampler, the light from the room fell full on the inside.

  Nobody had ever used the cupboard except Punch. For him it was a sort of magpie nest of odds and ends. He had had for years the habit of cutting articles and items from newspapers and often in an argument would get up and rummage for something he had read and kept to make his point. In addition there were the usual old pipes, watches that he intended to repair but never did, a whole hoard of things that ‘might one day come in useful’. Mrs Shipley knew the cupboard was there but had never touched it after a first early attempt to tidy it when Punch came to the Dower House to live. There was nothing secret about it. It was just Punch’s cupboard.

  And now, as Seyton was about to push the sampler door shut, his eye was caught by a long white foolscap envelope lying on top of the junk with his name written on it and addressed to him care of Beaton’s office in New York.

  He took it back to the fireplace and sat down. The envelope was unsealed and inside were two sheets of lined foolscap paper. The first sheet was dated the day before Punch had been killed in the car accident, the day on which Nancy and her father had come over to have dinner with Punch, though this last fact—unlike the date—did not immediately recall itself to Seyton.

  The letter read:

  Dear Richard,

  Figgins has been trying to get your address or bloody whereabouts for me without any luck, so Pm sending this to Beaton who, she says, will get it to you. For God’s sake why can’t you be properly organized like other folk? Anyway, what I’ve got to say I don’t want to take any risks with—and I don’t think I’ll get to finish it tonight because Nancy and the old man are coming to dinner. Anyway from here on in Pm going to have to put it all in dear old Sarah’s fancy work—which I’m sure you won’t have forgotten, having that kind of mind.

  From this point on the rest of the letter was written in block letters in the Satan Sampler code which they had used for years when they were boys and young men. Ignoring his cold supper Seyton poured himself a glass of wine, drank half and then got up and rummaged for fresh paper on which to decode Punch’s letter. For a little while it was difficult and he was tempted to refer to the sampler on the wall, but refused this aid since it was a challenge to him. It was not long before it all came back.

  It took him some time to decode the rest of the front and back of the first sheet of paper which read:

  The thing is, I know I wouldn’t take your help originally to finance me when father died and the Hall became mine. Thought I could make it on my own. Bloody stubborn fool I was. And again a BF when I accepted the Felbeck thing against your wishes. But it seemed a good idea at the time. Anyway, the point is now that I really need your help—on the cash side eventually. No time for any stupid kind of pride now. But more urgent is that I need you here and your advice because you see, Richard, there is a way now that they can be turfed out. I’ve got enough proof of their real goings on to get their lease broken legally if they want it taken that far—which they won’t. Though, God knows, there’s more involved than simply breaking the lease because it could be a bloody dangerous business considering what part of their real set-up is. That’s why I need you and the thing must stay just between us until we’ve worked out the proper line.

  Frankly it’s all too big for me alone. I need you at my side. Even writing like this I won’t go into details—for safety’s sake—but I can tell you that they really have been sods and worse. I’ve got some of it on tape and film and frankly I’m boiling over.

  The first sheet ended at this point and, taking up the second to decode, Seyton saw that only part of the first side had been used. It read:

  You see it isn’t just the Hall and us. It goes far beyond that, and if it hadn’t been for a pure accident I’d be sitting here like an innocent still.

  It all happened when I was doing the quarterly check-up at the Hall with Shanklin and he got an urgent phone call to go and fetch some visiting big-wig who had arrived at Shobdon airfield. So I was left alone to finish the rounds. Well when I was down in the wine cellars just for old times sake—and nobody around to know—I thought I’d pop up the way we used to as lads to take a peek at the maids in their bedroom. Well, I spotted at once that someone had been using that way. More I won’t say—except that} after what I found up there, I had to take some bloody risks. So you see you’ve got to come back hell for leather and hold my hand. But just in case anything goes wrong this end before you can get here all you have to do is to look in that place where we used to each . . .

  Here the letter finished, and it was not difficult for Seyton to guess what had happened. Nancy and her father had arrived and, before going to greet them, Punch had put the unfinished letter in its envelope and shut it away in the Sampler cupboard to finish the next evening. But by the next evening Punch was dead, his car skidding off the road at six o’clock on the way home from Hereford with Shipley at his side.

  Seyton put the letter back in the envelope, folded it in half and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket. Ignoring his glass of red wine and the cold supper, he fixed himself a large whisky, and then sat in front of the fire, staring at the red glow of the slow burning oak logs. Now, slowly, as he went over things in his mind—not letting himself get in the slightest degree emotional—he realized why Nancy and Roger and a few others had marked a change in Punch. Even Shanklin at the Hall. Punch was not good at containing his feelings. Then, slowly, a grim vein of excitement began to throb in him. If Punch said he had found proof, and recorded it—then that proof still existed, or at least there was a heavily weighted set of odds that it would; and what Punch had hidden he was damned sure that he could find. He sat there blankly staring at the fire and started—curiously without excitement—to think back over the old days as boys and young men when he and Punch had been so close without secrets from one another.

  * * * *

  The following evening at half-past six Sir Manfred Grandison, dressed in an old-style dinner jacket, came into Warboys’ room and said without preamble, “I’ll have a glass of your indifferent Marsala to put me in the mood for the company I shall be having at dinner . . . pretentious and insincere, the new elite riding that old shire horse which dear old Lowe years ago branded with the cartoon
initials T.U.C. That is to say . . .”

  Warboys smiled. “The Prime Minister, and the Secretary of State for Employment—or should it be Unemployment?”

  “His specific brief is responsibility for Government policies affecting the working life of the country’s population and the needs of potential workers, plus, of course, the promotion of good industrial relations blah, blah, blah . . . They both aspire to the reputation of gourmets and both feel that they could, did he now live, give Andre Simon a run for his money. Fish and chips and a glass of stout would become them better and certainly please me more.”

  “Our Lords and Masters.” Warboys moved to provide the Marsala for his superior and served himself with a brandy.

  Grandison took his glass, raised it and said, “God bless them. Democracy gives us strange bedfellows. Which brings me to the point germane of this courtesy call. I’ve just read your report on Miss Collet with the query you raise about her.”

  “More a comment.”

  “Truth is a great ally—if kept in a subordinate position. He found out about her father through her gossipy publisher. All very natural. Men are sympathetic to women in distress and will, as a consequence, often be moved to unusual chivalry or concern. The Ministry of Defence is one thing. He knows about that. We remain—and so do Collet’s connections here—beyond the veil. Let her run, I say. And you?”

  “I’m inclined to agree.”

  “Incline more and be positive.” Grandison drained his Marsala, made a face, took the silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and began to polish his monocle.

  “Positive then. I think Seyton has a certain simplistic view of women. An emotional man underneath. Sentimental—particularly about the family. When she did the drawing of the mare with foal one might think he over-reacted. But not at all. He’s like that—if the atmospheric conditions are right. My verdict is that she has already got him hooked but is playing him so delicately that he has yet—but we hope never—to feel the barb. Or do we?”