Snobbery With Violence - M. C. Beaton [47]
“You are not regarded as the epitome of respectability—or had you forgotten?”
“You cannot leave me out.”
“Oh, very well. We’ll set off at seven in the morning before the others are awake to ask questions. Becket has found out the Gore-Desmonds’ address.”
Daisy sat in a shadowy corner of the hall. Freddy Pomfret and Tristram Baker-Willis came out of the drawing-room and moved over to the fireplace to light cigarettes.
“So our Lady Rose is psychic,” sneered Freddy “Never heard such a load of rubbish.”
“Wouldn’t it be fun to haunt her,” said Tristram.
“I say. Sheets and clanking chains and wailing?”
“No, you don’t want to rouse the others. Just white face, white-powdered hair and point accusingly. No, think again. I’ve got it. Our bed sheets with holes cut in them for eyes.”
“She’ll scream and everyone will come running.”
“Tell you what, old boy, I’ll do the ghost bit, glare accusingly, and then we flee down the backstairs and hide until the fuss is over.”
“What larks! When’ll we do it?”
“About one o clock.”
Rose, on entering her room that evening, found her maid in a high state of excitement. “Mr. Pomfret and Mr. Baker-Willis are coming to haunt you!”
She told Rose what she had overheard.
“Thank goodness you found out what they were planning to do,” said Rose. “I’ll lock my door and they can haunt all they like out in the corridor.”
“It would be great to give them a fright,” said Daisy. “I could haunt them.”
“No,” said Rose slowly. “I could do it. I wish there was some way of making me up to look like Mary Gore-Desmond.”
“There’s a big hamper of theatrical stuff downstairs that they use for charades. But all you really need is a sort of sandy wig. They’ve got a box of grease-paint as well. I could make up your face. I was in the theatre, remember. Here’s what we’ll do ...”
Freddy and Tristram, staggering a little with all they had drunk, emerged from their rooms. Each was wearing a sheet over his head with eyeholes cuts in it.
They started to mount the steps to the tower where Rose’s room was located.
They had nearly reached the first landing when a figure, lit dramatically by a shaft of moonUght shining through an arrow slit, confronted them.
They stopped and clutched each other. All they could see was sandy hair over a thin chalk-white face contorted into an awful sneer. Then one white hand materialized and pointed at them.
“Murderers,” wailed an unearthly voice. “You murdered me.”
And then it disappeared.
It did not dawn on the frightened pair that the unearthly apparition had simply stepped back into the unlit blackness of the landing.
“Help!” called Freddy, his voice weak and thin as in a nightmare. “Help!” shouted Tristram, finding his voice.
Their terror had made them forget that they were still draped in sheets. Frederica Sutherland, the first to come running, saw the sheeted figures and fell down in a faint.
Others came crowding the bottom of the staircase. “Take off those sheets,” roared Lord Hedley. “Blithering idiots.”
They pulled off the sheets. “It was just a joke,” said Freddy. “But we saw this ghost of Mary Gore-Desmond.”
“She called us murderers,” said Tristram. N
“Someone’s playing a joke on you. You are both drunk.”
“But we saw her,” wailed Tristram. He suddenly vomited all over the stairs.
“Get to bed, all of you,” ordered the marquess. “I’ll deal with you two in the morning.”
Rose rolled around her bed with a handkerchief stuffed in her mouth to muffle her laughter. “Oh, Daisy,” she finally gasped. “How wonderful it was. And when the fuss has died down, they may start to wonder whether there really might be a ghost after all.”
Daisy laughed as well. She was relieved the haunting had gone well, and also relieved that her mistress was behaving more like a young girl and less like some sort of chilly mannequin with a head stuffed with facts.
Rose fell happily asleep that night, looking forward to telling Harry about the success of their exploit.
He was furious. “Don’t you know what danger you