10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [75]
“No,” my father said. “Not classified information. They couldn’t!”
He was scandalized. I shook my head.
“What, then?” Polly asked. “What do they give him?”
“I’d guess,” I said, “that they give him attention. I’d guess they listen to him and act on his advice. Orinda said years ago that he had a terrific understanding of what would happen in politics. He would predict things and tell Dennis Nagle what to do about them and Orinda said he was nearly always right. Dennis Nagle had his feet on the upward path, and if he hadn’t died I’d think he’d be in the Cabinet by now with Wyvern at his shoulder.”
My father pushed his broccoli aside. A good thing his broccoli farmers weren’t watching. They were agitating for a broccoli awareness week to make the British eat their greens. A law to ban excess broccoli would have had healthier results.
“If he’s so clever,” Polly asked, “why isn’t he in the Cabinet himself?”
“Orinda told me the sort of power Alderney really wants is to be able to pull the levers behind the scenes. I thought it a crazy idea. I’ve grown up since then.”
“Power without responsibility,” my father murmured.
“Allied,” I said ruefully, “to a frighteningly violent temper which explodes when he’s crossed.”
My father hadn’t actually seen Wyvern hit Orinda. He hadn’t seen the speed and the force and the heartlessness; but he had seen the blood and tears and they alone had driven him to try to retaliate. Wyvern had wanted to damage my father’s reputation by provoking my father to hit him. I dimly understood, but still hadn’t properly worked it out, that attacking Wyvern would, in the end, destroy the attacker.
My boss Evan agreeing, I’d tied in the No. 10 Thursday evening reception with a Friday-morning trip to meet a claims inspector to see if a hay barn had burned by accident or design (accident) and was due to stay again on Friday night in London with Polly and my father before going to ride at Stratford-upon-Avon on Saturday, but en route I got a message to return to meet my father in Downing Street by two that Friday afternoon.
“I thought you might like to see more of the house,” he said cheerfully. “You can’t see a thing at those receptions.”
He had arranged for one of the household staff—called a messenger—to accompany us and show us around officially, so we went up the yellow staircase again, spending longer over the pictures, and wandered around the three large drawing rooms leading off the anteroom at the top of the stairs; the white drawing room, the green drawing room and the pillared drawing room where they’d held the reception.
The messenger was proud of the house, which he said looked better and was better looked after than at any time in its rickety history. It had once been two houses back to back (rather like the burned shops of Hoopwestern): the small Downing Street house facing one way, and a mansion to the rear of it facing the other. The interior layout over two and a half centuries had been constantly redesigned, and a modem refurbishment had bestowed overall an eighteenth-century ambience that hadn’t been there before.
“The green drawing room used to be the blue drawing room,” the messenger said happily. “All the beautiful plaster work on nearly all the ceilings is relatively new. So are the classical mantels over the doorways. It all looks now like it always should have done, and never did.”
We admired it all copiously, to his satisfaction.
“Through here,” he said, marching off into one corner of the pillared drawing room, “is the small dining room.” (It seated twelve in comfort.) “Beyond that is the State Dining Room.” (Dark-paneled walls, seats for twenty-four.)
He told us about all the paintings in all the rooms. I thought of all the past prime ministers for whom this graceful splendor had not existed, who had used this building as an office. It seemed a shame and a waste, somehow.
Back in the anteroom to the drawing rooms our guide told us, pointing, “Up those stairs is the prime minister’s private apartment, and behind that locked door is his own personal room, where no one