The Satan Sampler

by Victor Canning

  “Your metaphor is a bit sloppy. So I’ll cap it in the same vein. That depends on which way he swims so we won’t count our chickens until they’re hatched, dear Warboys. Anyway, let her run.”

  “She is doing that already. Ten minutes ago Kerslake passed on a report from her that Seyton spent one hour and ten minutes in the Seyton family chapel today. So devout a man?”

  “If you have a private chapel—why not use it? Domine, dirige nos.”

  “To where? The report further adds that during the course of these seventy minutes and about twenty minutes after entry he left the chapel, went back to the Dower House, and then returned carrying a long pole.”

  Grandison frowned, and said crossly, “What kind of report is that? How long is a pole and what is a pole?”

  “Kerslake—who made the same enquiry—says she thought the length would be over six feet and under twelve feet, and that the pole was . . . well, not whippy like bamboo, but rigid in the way a curtain pole would be. She was watching through glasses at a distance of nearly two hundred yards. Interestingly when he left the chapel he did not have the pole with him.”

  “What the hell could he have been doing with that?” Containing his surprise, not at the bluntness but the tone of the question and the hint of an angry frown which went with it, Warboys said, “I have no idea—except that he might have been putting up curtains of some form in the chapel. And, except again——” he was enjoying himself, “——Seyton is not the type to do things like that by himself when he has workmen who could do it for him.”

  Grandison suddenly smiled. “Good. Now stop enjoying yourself at my expense and tell her to find out, if she can, about the pole. The chapel is never locked. I know that.”

  “I’ve already told Kerslake to pass that instruction to her.

  But you know——” Warboys was loath to deny himself a little further enjoyment, “——there’s probably a simple answer. It’s spring. Maybe some bird was nesting in there and he wanted to knock down the nest. Bird lime on the family memorial tablets of the Seytons? Lèse majesté. No?”

  “There, yes. And also to some extent here now. And now, too, what about the report on Seyton’s business affairs?”

  “Interim only. Impeccable. No question of ‘Collar ’im tight in the name of the Law!’ ”

  Grandison gave a broad grin. “Don’t tell me. Kipling, I should say.”

  “Sadly, no. Max Beerbohm. However—to return to our muttons—there is one little ray of sunshine. He—or perhaps more correctly his firm—use a man called Helder. You won’t know him. We’ve never used him, and never should—except in some extreme situation—because he suffers from an old-fashioned disease known as loyalty to his clients. If I sent someone to have a chat with him about Seyton—then Seyton would know within a few hours. So—should it be necessary to have a chat with him—then we would have to keep Helder in durance vile until whatever had to be done had been done.”

  “You mean such men still exist?”

  “A few—but they don’t breed often. I think their honesty makes them sterile. So do we leave him in peace?”

  “Reluctantly, yes, unless ultimately forced.” Grandison sighed and then, shaking his head and chuckling good humouredly for a moment or two, went on, “My goodness, and I had thought that on our side of the fence all men like that had ‘died in the young summer of the world’s desire; Before our hearts were broken—Like sticks on a fire’.” He finished, his eyes challenging Warboys.

  “Not difficult, but a guess, not from knowledge. It must be W. B. Yeats.”

  With boyish pleasure clear on his piratical face, Grandison shook his head. “It should be, shouldn’t it? But it isn’t. It’s Chesterton, a parody of W.B. And now I go to take dinner with Our Lord and Master and his sycophant. How sad it is that in this country political assassination is out of fashion and that the stupidity and vanity of one man can slowly destroy a nation.” Then with something approaching a look of anger on his face and his voice rasping, he went on, “I’m tired of the whole sorry mess. I say a pox on vox populi.”

  When he was gone Warboys finished his brandy and helped himself to another and sat quietly at his desk, not deep in thought, nor speculation, but aware of the beginning of some slow powerful tide of intuition, rare and signalled by small signs as were the tides of the seas as they turned . . . a shift of wind, a new pattern in the flight of shore birds, the sea anemones slowly rebuttoning themselves against the coming touch of air and sun and the small green crabs seeking the shelter of bladder-wrack havens under the rocks. And then slowly into his consciousness came the figure of sorry, sad Collet. Nobody, he thought, was invulnerable; that would be contrary to God’s creative pattern. Each man was left to find his own way. There was no escaping that—neither for Grandison, for himself or for anyone else in the whole wide world of the human ant heap.

  * * * *

  That same evening Seyton lay in his bath wishing that Nancy and her father were not coming to dinner. His mind was still full of the discovery of Punch’s letter and he would have preferred to stay alone with his thoughts and speculations. The coincidence that she and her father had once drastically—tragically—interrupted Punch’s letter to him, gave rise to a faint superstition in him. Was it a good or a bad omen?

  Lying, soaking, he remembered the solicitor Bellamy handing over the heavily waxed sealed envelope to him—the ritual gone through with every Seyton succeeding to the Hall. In the family more ritual than secret. He who would leave the Hall unseen must go down the Master’s way. He who would enter the Hall unseen must pass by long silent Sarah. The Master’s way was from the set of maids’ bedrooms on the very top floor of the old Tudor part of the Hall. A narrow, secret stairway had been built into the enormous block of the central Tudor chimneys and this gave access to the cellars and from there along an underground tunnel to the chapel. According to family tradition a seventeenth-century Seyton forefather, after a tankard or two of malmsey or Canary wine, had used the chimney stairway to go up to the maids’ quarters to exercise his droit de seigneur. The chimney way was no great secret, but the tunnel to the chapel—its opening concealed by a pivoting wine-rack—was. He smiled to himself as he remembered how he and Punch, not long into their teens, had used the Master’s way at night to go up and watch the maids undressing through the ventilator grilles set high in the bedroom walls. Their own giggling and clumsiness had betrayed them and had earned them a determined leathering from their father and the door in the cellar had been padlocked against them. The leathering, he thought now, had been too severe to balance fairly the benefits of their Peeping Tom exploits for they had seen very little.

  There was no way that he could go openly to the Hall and examine the Master’s way. From now on his attitude and manner to all at the Hall had to be unexceptionable. But that day he had gone to the chapel to check the condition of the passageway to the cellar. Twenty yards from the foot of the narrow flight of steps that led down from the chapel floor level he had found that one side of the Tudor brick-lined tunnel had collapsed and blocked the passage. He had gone back to the Dower House and taken a long, stout ash pole which Mrs Shipley used to knock down the martins’ nest from over the back door of the kitchen quarters. “You can have ’em anywhere on the rest of the house, Mister Richard—but not over my back door. Makin’ a mess—and not only on the steps, but sometimes in my hair!”

  Back in the tunnel he had pushed the pole through the heavy dark soil. The pole was nearly twelve feet long and it was into the pile well over half its length before he felt it move easily, free of obstruction. It would take a good few hours’ work to shift the fall and spread it back along the tunnel towards the steps. That done, and hopefully there would be no other falls, he could get into the cellar at night—they still had racked and binned there a lot of their own wines and ports—and then go up the Master’s way to find—with luck—what Punch had found there and which had, clearly, spurred him to action. After that he would have to find
the film and tape which Punch must have hidden away somewhere. Already that day he had gone through all the likely places in the Dower House without success and had ransacked their old playroom over the stables, but that had not surprised him. Punch had a jackdaw mind and had been good at hiding things and himself when they had played their boyish games . . . But for the time being he wanted first to get into the Hall.

  That evening after dinner Captain Hope, stimulated by good food and port, and now further indulging himself with a large glass of brandy—carefree, as Nancy knew, because, cautiously abstemious she, having lost the toss between them, was to have the duty of driving home—got on his favourite hobby horse: the state of the nation. Not that the state of the country did not merit most of his strictures, for this was the tailing end of a winter of discontent; crippling strikes in industry and the social services, hospitals struggling to survive, schools closed, the Trade Unions militant and unable to control their own members and getting no firmness from a Government whose Cabinet Ministers were chiefly their subsidized lackeys . . . troops called out to run ambulance and fire services while pickets at factory and hospital gates bullied, assaulted, and intimidated workers who would have worked and volunteers who still knew the difference between human decency and human greed and envy, while all the while a nation once great and a country where once it had been safe to walk the streets at night slid nearer—his words, “The edge of the abyss at whose bottom lies Chaos, Corruption and the stinking Cesspool of all human evils. Where have all the virtues gone? Love thy neighbour? An honest day’s work for a fair day’s pay? I tell you this nation is destroying itself and the disease is an imported one as much as ever the Black Death was. All right, you may think I exaggerate. But, I tell you, we don’t just stand at the parting of the ways between a civilized state but are already well on the road to a Socialist shambles—and all deliberately engineered by crypto-Communists, pinko-intellectuals and power-seeking politicians who take orders from their masters either in Moscow or the Trade Unions. But never fear, sooner or later—because this is the law of opposites, the law that keeps the stars and planets in their courses—One will arise, some new Churchill, aye, or some Cromwell to tear down the false ideologies and to drive out of this once green and pleasant land all those who would turn it into a garbage heap where they would have our people root like pigs for scraps while their swineherd Marxist masters enjoy the spoils of tyrants and the fruits of privilege . . .”

  At a side table where she was helping herself to fresh coffee, Nancy smiled to herself. She loved the old boy when he talked like this. He enjoyed letting off steam so much and it did him a lot of good. Looking round she caught Richard’s eyes for a moment and winked at him and saw the corners of his mouth move in sympathy with her. He had been a bit subdued all evening she had thought and now—though he was used to it—he was being put through the hoop by her father, for the old boy had a way of lecturing that always seemed to imply that the one to whom he talked was to some extent responsible for the conditions he was condemning.

  “Where now do you find the only remaining concept of duty, honour, and unswerving loyalty to this grand old country? Not in the Church—weasel minded and mealy mouthed, more concerned with starving Asians and something they call the Third World when under God’s grace there is only one world and this country, one to which all the rest of mankind owe so much. No—keep your bishops. True virtue lives still in the Armed Forces of the Crown. Crown, I say—and what a dirty word these bastards try to make of that. The Armed Forces—

  underpaid, God save us, but loyal. No striking——”

  “Mutinies have been known,” said Nancy over her shoulder. “Damn it, yes—but because of bad officers. But on the whole—and you know damn well what I mean, my girl—they stand firm for Queen and Country. I tell you that one day—and not far off—it is going to come to a show-down between——”

  Crossing to him Nancy dropped into his lap a drawing roughly mounted temporarily on a stout piece of cardboard backing and said, “Richard’s heard it all before and I don’t want to drive you home in a state of apoplexy. What do you think of that?”

  Her father gave her an angry frown and then, as his eyes went to the drawing, all sign of his spleen slowly vanished to be replaced by a smile. “My God. . . That’s bloody marvellous. It’s old Suzie to a T. And the foal. Feller that did this knew his stuff.”

  “No fellow,” said Nancy. She pointed to the signature. “Georgina Collet.” She looked at Richard. “Who is she—and how come?”

  Seyton shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, she’s some artist type. Asked permission to wander round the place to do wild life drawings . . . for a book or exhibition or something. She turned up with that. Kind of thank you, I suppose.”

  “And a very nice one too,” said the Captain. “Think she’d come over to my place and do something for me?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I rather gather she’s got her hands pretty full at the moment with commissions.”

  “Well, if she’s still around, could you ask her? Or if not—then let me have her address.”

  “Well, I suppose so, yes.”

  “What does the ‘suppose so’ mean?” asked Nancy, and as she spoke she knew from the faintest change in his manner and voice that some small ripple of emotion had disturbed him from the moment she had dropped the drawing into her father’s lap. “Is she here still or has she gone?”

  “Oh, no . . . I think she’s around still from time to time.”

  “Well, the next time you see her, will you ask her?”

  “Yes, of course I will. I’ll ask her to give you a ring.” Amused, but hiding it, knowing her Richard and the irrelevancy of any jealousy on her part, Nancy could not deny herself the mild but loving malice of a further small probe. Bed they shared now and again, but unashamedly she longed to make it a marriage bed. No other man could stand alongside him so far as she was concerned. But she knew herself no fool to build high hopes. Just a few small ones which she hugged for comfort now and then. So, looking full at him, and letting her voice tease him with a note of well-known gentle raillery, she asked, “What’s she like? Young? Old? Ravishing beauty or one of those hair-drawn-back types and never use anything but soap and water on the face? Come on, give.”

  Seyton laughed, knowing his Nancy and genuinely amused so that he sought no escape from truth. “She’s bloody marvellous. Thirty-odd. Splendid auburn hair. Super figure. But more than all that she’s got that gift.” He nodded at the drawing which the Captain still held.

  “I don’t care a damn what she looks like,” said the Captain. “Two heads as far as I’m concerned. But you ask her to give me a ring.”

  “Yes, do that, Richard,” said Nancy. “I’d like to meet her. And now, my tub-thumping father—get on your feet. We’re for home.”

  “You can joke, my girl. But you wait until the day of decision comes. That won’t be any joking matter.”

  Looking at the drawing after they had gone Seyton smiled for a moment or two, thinking of Nancy and her gentle but unnecessary probe, and then the drawing of the grazing mare with foal brought Punch back to him, excluding all other thoughts. On a night like this, with the Captain and Nancy here, he must have stood when they had gone and could have gone back to finish the letter to him but had probably been too tired and a bit full of good drink to feel like it. And why not? There had been all the time in the world ahead of him . . . tomorrow and tomorrow . . . but there always had to come a tomorrow which no man could outlive.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE NEXT MORNING it was raining hard with a cold wind from the north-east. Kerslake telephoned Georgina from his hotel room before going down to breakfast, and came quickly to the point.

  “Don’t go down to the Hall today.”

  “I had no intention of doing so—for obvious reasons. I couldn’t do any drawing or observing.”

  “Exactly. But I’ll go. I can watch the chapel from the bluff across the river—not on his land. I wonde
r what the hell he’s doing in there?” It was no serious question, merely he knew a device to keep her on the line a little longer, wondering whether she stood now, a dressing gown loose over her nightdress, her bold, firm body sun-browned, warm from sleep . . . he let the pictures of her slide through his mind and at the same time was bored and calmly disgusted with himself, as though he had picked up some well-thumbed girlie magazine, flipping through the nudes and wondering why the hell he did it. “Maybe he’s taken up brass rubbing.”

  “I think the whole damned thing’s a nonsense.”

  “My dear father used to say that seventy-five per cent of the time that’s all it ever was with . . . well, the firm he worked for.”

  “Maybe . . .”

  “Wrap up well and fill your whisky flask.”

  He knew she had no true concern for him, but found a little comfort just in the words. “I’ll do that. And I was wondering . . .”

  She laughed but without unkindness, he felt, and said, “There’s no need to. Call in on your way back and have a drink.”

  “That’s good of you.”

  “Not really. I get flat too. And any company is better than none.”

  “That’s a bastard thing to say to a man.” He spoke without edge to his voice; oddly, too, relishing her words as a true step towards compassion—of which he had no need.

  “I know. But that’s how we have to be at times, isn’t it? I’ll try and remember to think of you while I’m working here all nice and bloody cosy. Don’t forget—you made your own choice. I didn’t. That gives me the right to say bastard things to you.”

  He was on the far side of the river by half-past nine. The water was beginning to colour up with the run-off from the rain. He sat just inside a young spruce plantation with a clump of broom bushes for cover and had a clear view of the front of the chapel. He sat there until half-past eleven when he was rewarded with the sight of Richard Seyton, wearing a mackintosh and cap, leaving the chapel. The man walked without hurry, head down a little against the rain, back to the Dower House.