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By Root 1196 0

round the waist with (of all things) coarse brown string. Really, the things girls trussed themselves up with! As it happened it was Faith who had tied this knot for her sister—and as a joke (Charity had not been able to see what she was doing behind her back) she had tied it as tightly as she could, one knot on top of another, so that Charity would never never ever be able to get it undone. Matthews had stubby, thick fingers which were stiff with the cold although he had tried warming them over the lamp. To make things worse, he was in the habit of biting his nails with the result that he was now picking away at the knot as clumsily as if he had been wearing gloves. He could cut it with a penknife, of course. He paused, tempted. But no; that would be unsporting. This knot was a challenge and he wasn’t the kind of man to duck a challenge. He’d already got so far, besides, he didn’t like to think of all his patient work going to waste. Breathing through his dry mouth, tongue between his teeth with concentration, he applied himself to his task.

And then his parcel was untied at last! It had taken him another three or four minutes before his diligence was at last rewarded. All he had to do now was remove the final wrapping; he would just have to roll her over on to her front and on to her back a few more times to ease the camisole off and then...he would have opened the small locked door leading into the garden of delight.

All this time Charity was being tossed savagely to and fro on stormy seas and by now she was feeling alarmingly sick. One moment she was rocking back and forth on the mail-boat with that dreadful lurching one feels as one first leaves the protection of the Howth peninsula and forges out into the open sea; the next she was shipwrecked and bobbing about helplessly in the water. It was icy cold and she had lost all her clothes—a huge wave had just come and turned her completely over, dragging away the last stitch she had on—and then somehow she was lying on her back on a rock and some appalling Creature (that resembled a black sea-lion with a white shirt and black bow-tie, rather like an illustration from Alice in Wonderland), an appalling Creature was trying to dislodge her from the rock and send her sliding back into the black water...and now a moist pink tongue was licking her kneecaps and a scratchy moustache was tickling her thighs ...At this moment, as luck would have it, her roaming hand closed over a very cold, elongated stone and she swung it up and hit the Creature with it. With a soft moan the Creature vanished back into the water...but Charity continued to feel sick until at last she vomited enormously, volcanically, over the side of the bed. Then the waves calmed down and she felt very much better.

The bottle of champagne had not broken, however, when she hit Matthews (who was now lying on the floor with a fractured skull); her fingers had released it and it lay like a block of ice between her thighs. The cork, meanwhile, had begun to travel imperceptibly away from the bottle as Charity floated peacefully onwards (and Faith in the next room groped around in the darkness trying to collect up as many of her garments as possible). Presently it gathered momentum and exploded. A long cry of pain broke from Charity’s lips as the freezing liquid bubbled over the warm skin of her stomach.

Downstairs the Major paused and thought anxiously: “One of the twins?”—but he had Padraig to think of and hurried on.

In the next room Faith paused in alarm at her sister’s bloodcurdling cry and thought that perhaps, after all, it mightn’t be such a bad thing that her own escapade had proved a failure—while beside her in the oily darkness Mortimer thought bitterly: “What a cad the fellow is! Taking advantage of her like that...”

Another person heard the scream. This was Murphy, who had been lurking in the shadowy corridor and seen the twins come up with their young men. When he heard it he chuckled; then his gaunt figure melted back into the darkness. As he went, the moonlight from an uncurtained window glinted momentarily