By the Pricking of My Thumbs - Agatha Christie [81]
‘Certainly,’ said Tuppence, faintly annoyed, however, that Miss Bligh should answer for her health so confidently.
‘Come and sit down here and have a cushion behind your back,’ said Miss Bligh.
‘I don’t need a cushion,’ said Tuppence, refusing to accept the chair that Miss Bligh was officiously pulling forward. Instead, she sat down in an upright and exceedingly uncomfortable chair on the other side of the fireplace.
There was a sharp rap on the front door and everyone in the room jumped. Miss Bligh hurried out.
‘Don’t worry, Vicar,’ she said. ‘I’ll go.’
‘Please, if you will be so kind.’
There were low voices outside in the hall, then Miss Bligh came back shepherding a big woman in a brocade shift, and behind her a very tall thin man, a man of cadaverous appearance. Tuppence stared at him. A black cloak was round his shoulders, and his thin gaunt face was like the face from another century. He might have come, Tuppence thought, straight out of an El Greco canvas.
‘I’m very pleased to see you,’ said the vicar, and turned. ‘May I introduce Sir Philip Starke, Mr and Mrs Beresford. Mr Ivor Smith. Ah! Mrs Boscowan. I’ve not seen you for many, many years–Mr and Mrs Beresford.’
‘I’ve met Mr Beresford,’ said Mrs Boscowan. She looked at Tuppence. ‘How do you do,’ she said. ‘I’m glad to meet you. I heard you’d had an accident.’
‘Yes. I’m all right again now.’
The introductions completed, Tuppence sat back in her chair. Tiredness swept over her as it seemed to do rather more frequently than formerly, which she said to herself was possibly a result of concussion. Sitting quietly, her eyes half closed, she was nevertheless scrutinizing everyone in the room with close attention. She was not listening to the conversation, she was only looking. She had a feeling that a few of the characters in the drama–the drama in which she had unwittingly involved herself–were assembled here as they might be in a dramatic scene. Things were drawing together, forming themselves into a compact nucleus. With the coming of Sir Philip Starke and Mrs Boscowan it was as though two hitherto unrevealed characters were suddenly presenting themselves. They had been there all along, as it were, outside the circle, but now they had come inside. They were somehow concerned, implicated. They had come here this evening–why, she wondered? Had someone summoned them? Ivor Smith? Had he commanded their presence, or only gently demanded it? Or were they perhaps as strange to him as they were to her? She thought to herself: ‘It all began in Sunny Ridge, but Sunny Ridge isn’t the real heart of the matter. That was, had always been, here, in Sutton Chancellor. Things had happened here. Not very lately, almost certainly not lately. Long ago. Things which had nothing to do with Mrs Lancaster–but Mrs Lancaster had become unknowingly involved. So where was Mrs Lancaster now?’
A little cold shiver passed over Tuppence.
‘I think,’ thought Tuppence, ‘I think perhaps she’s dead…’
If so, Tuppence felt, she herself had failed. She had set out on her quest worried about Mrs Lancaster, feeling that Mrs Lancaster was threatened with some danger and she had resolved to find Mrs Lancaster, protect her.
‘And if she isn’t dead,’ thought Tuppence, ‘I’ll still do it!’
Sutton Chancellor…That was where the beginning of something meaningful and dangerous had happened. The house with the canal was part of it. Perhaps it was the centre of it all, or was it Sutton Chancellor itself? A place where people had lived, had come to, had left, had run away, had vanished, had disappeared and reappeared. Like Sir Philip Starke.
Without turning her head Tuppence’s eyes went to Sir Philip Starke. She knew nothing about him except what Mrs Copleigh had poured out in the course of her monologue on the general inhabitants. A quiet man, a learned