Postern of Fate (Tommy and Tuppence Series) - Agatha Christie [31]
‘I wonder where it takes one,’ said Tuppence. ‘There must be a reason for it.’
Perhaps, she thought, as the path took a couple of sharp turns in opposite directions, making a zigzag and making Tuppence feel that she knew exactly what Alice in Wonderland had meant by saying that a path would suddenly shake itself and change direction. There were fewer bushes, there were laurels now, possibly fitting in with the name given to the property, and then a rather stony, difficult, narrow path wound up between them. It came very suddenly to four moss-covered steps leading up to a kind of niche made of what had once been metal and later seemed to have been replaced by bottles. A kind of shrine, and in it a pedestal and on this pedestal a stone figure, very much decayed. It was the figure of a boy with a basket on his head. A feeling of recognition came to Tuppence.
‘This is the sort of thing you could date a place with,’ she said. ‘It’s very like the one Aunt Sarah had in her garden. She had a lot of laurels too.’
Her mind went back to Aunt Sarah, whom she had occasionally visited as a child. She had played herself, she remembered, a game called River Horses. For River Horses you took your hoop out. Tuppence, it may be said, had been six years old at the time. Her hoop represented the horses. White horses with manes and flowing tails. In Tuppence’s imagination, with that you had gone across a green, rather thick patch of grass and you had then gone round a bed planted with pampas grass waving feathery heads into the air, up the same kind of a path, and leaning there among some beech trees in the same sort of summer-house niche was a figure and a basket. Tuppence, when riding her winning horses here, had taken a gift always, a gift you put in the basket on top of the boy’s head; at the same time you said it was an offering and you made a wish. The wish, Tuppence remembered, was nearly always to come true.
‘But that,’ said Tuppence, sitting down suddenly on the top step of the flight she had been climbing, ‘that, of course, was because I cheated really. I mean, I wished for something that I knew was almost sure to happen, and then I could feel that my wish had come true and it really was a magic. It was a proper offering to a real god from the past. Though it wasn’t a god really, it was just a podgy-looking little boy. Ah well–what fun it is, all the things one used to invent and believe in and play at.’
She sighed, went down the path again and found her way to the mysteriously named KK.
KK looked in just the same mess as ever. Mathilde was still looking forlorn and forsaken, but two more things attracted Tuppence’s attention. They were in porcelain–porcelain stools with the figures of white swans curled round them. One stool was dark blue and the other stool was pale blue.
‘Of course,’ said Tuppence, ‘I’ve seen things like that before when I was young. Yes, they used to be on verandas. One of my other aunts had them, I think. We used to call them Oxford and Cambridge. Very much the same. I think it was ducks–no, it was swans they had round them. And then there was the same sort of queer thing in the seat, a sort of hole that was like a letter S. The sort of thing you could put things into. Yes, I think I’ll get Isaac to take these two stools out of here and give them a good wash, and then we’ll have them on the loggia, or lodger as he will insist on calling it, though the veranda comes more natural to me. We’ll put them on that and enjoy them when the good weather comes.’
She turned